/lit/ - Literature

>>19696634

Sea of Fertility. It's a recurring theme in all the novels. Really has been shaking my world and motivated me to approach life and become healthier as it's only downhill from where I'm at. I'm beginning to understand his strange fetish for dying young, too. Such is the intensity of his hatred for old age.

>But it had come to seem that there was no distinguishing between pain of the spirit and pain of the flesh. What was the difference between humiliation and a swollen prostate? Between the pangs of sorrow and pneumonia? Senility was a proper ailment of both the spirit and the flesh, and the fact that senility was an incurable disease meant that existence was an incurable disease. It was a disease unrelated to existentialist theories, the flesh itself being the disease, latent death.

>If the cause of decay was illness, then the fundamental cause of that, the flesh, was illness too. The essence of the flesh was decay. It had its spot in time to give evidence of destruction and decay.

>Why did people first become aware of that fact only as old age came on? Why, when it buzzed faintly past the ear in the brief noontide of the flesh, did they note it only to forget it? Why did the healthy young athlete, in the shower after his exertions, watching the drops of water hit his shining flesh like hail, not see that the high tide of life itself was the cruelest of ills, a dark, amber-colored lump?

My prison bars were forged from the very fabric of reality.

Sea of Fertility tetralogy. It becomes a theme in the second novel and those after as Honda ages.

Ted is Ellul for the most part, but simplified and praxis oriented (lmao). No one ever gives a concrete reason for why they dislike Ted apart from his destructive acts. Yeah, he killed some nerds and even some innocents. Personally, it's fascinating that he at least put the pen to the sword in spite of the costs it heaved upon himself. That's a kind of man you won't find nowadays. Sure, by conventional morality, he's deplorable, but eh.
Sometimes, in the pursuit of an ideal, innocent people get hurt. I'm not sure why commies/ultra leftists would hate him for their heroes are very much in the same vein.

>But it had come to seem that there was no distinguishing between pain of the spirit and pain of the flesh. What was the difference between humiliation and a swollen prostate? Between the pangs of sorrow and pneumonia? Senility was a proper ailment of both the spirit and the flesh, and the fact that senility was an incurable disease meant that existence was an incurable disease. It was a disease unrelated to existentialist theories, the flesh itself being the disease, latent death.

>If the cause of decay was illness, then the fundamental cause of that, the flesh, was illness too. The essence of the flesh was decay. It had its spot in time to give evidence of destruction and decay.

>Why did people first become aware of that fact only as old age came on? Why, when it buzzed faintly past the ear in the brief noontide of the flesh, did they note it only to forget it? Why did the healthy young athlete, in the shower after his exertions, watching the drops of water hit his shining flesh like hail, not see that the high tide of life itself was the cruelest of ills, a dark, amber-colored lump?

— Mishima Yukio, The Decay of the Angel (1971)