John Pappano

“The essay was entitled “Gibbon Through the Night,” and from it Isao was able to draw this essential portion: By any standard Gibbon’s work is a masterpiece. It goes without saying that I am far too deficient in scholarship and intellect to comprehend its wisdom, but I may safely contend that no Japanese translation can possibly convey the monumental significance of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The lavishly illustrated 1909 edition edited by Professor Bury, seven volumes, unabridged, is absolutely without peer. When I give myself over to the pleasure of reading Gibbon by the light afforded by my bedside lamp, the hour inevitably grows far advanced. The breathing of my sleeping wife beside me, the rustle of the pages of my Bury edition of Gibbon, and the ticking of the antique clock purchased from LeRoi’s of Paris become by and by the only sounds that occupy the silence of my bedroom, forming a kind of delicate nocturnal trio. And the small lamp that illumines Gibbon’s pages is, within the whole house, the last torch of the intellect to be extinguished each night.”
― Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

“People have long lived in fear of too much freedom, too much carnal desire. The freshness of the morning after an evening when one has abstained from drinking wine. The pride one feels on realizing that water alone is essential. Such refreshing, new pleasures were beginning to seduce people.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn: The Sea of Fertility, 3

“He clasped her tighter, feeling their two bodies shake like the mast of a plunging ship.”
― Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

“The beautiful, bow-shaped winter lips of the women created a momentary crevice, attractive and warm, in the clear air as they passed by. The heroes in the bombers must dream at times of just such lips. Young men were always like that, seeking the most rigorous and yet attracted to the most tender. Could the tenderest thing they seek be death? Honda himself had once been a young man of promise, but not one attracted to death.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn: The Sea of Fertility, 3