Tim O'Ryan

“The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“I’m doing fine. I eat dogs! Heh heh heh!’ I”
― Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

“The sea was a dull, monotonous green. Slowly, the tide was coming in.

Tōru lowered the telescope to the waves of the beach.
As they broke, a spray like the dregs of the sea slipped from their backs, and the pyramids of deep green changed, rose and swelled into an uneasy white. The sea lost its serenity.

Even as it rose it broke at the skirts, and ragged spots of white from its high belly like a call of inexpressible sorrow became a sharply smooth yet infinitely cracked wall of glass, like a vast spray. As it rose and broke, the forelocks were combed a beautiful white, and as it fell it showed the neatly arrayed blue-white of its crown, and the lines of white became a solid field of white; and so it fell, like a severed head.

The spray and the falling away of foam. Little patches of foam trailing off to sea like lines of water bugs.

From trailing off over the sand like swear from the back of an athlete at the end of his exertions.

What delicate changes passed over the white monolith of the sea as it came in upon the shore and broke. The myriad confusion of thin waves and the fine partings of the foam became in desperation an infinity of lines spewed out over the sea as from silkworms. What a subtle evil, overcoming by sheer force even as it took into itself this delicate white.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“It ended a few feet from where he sat. The sea, broad and vast, with all its mighty force, ended right there before his eyes. Be it the edge of time or space, there is nothing so awe-inspiring as a border. To be here at this place with his three companions, at this marvellous border between land and sea, struck him as being very similar to being alive as one age ending and another beginning, like being part of a great moment in history. And then too the tide of their own era, in which he and Kiyoaki lived, also had to have an appointed time and ebb, a shore on which to break, a limit beyond which it could not go.

The sea ended right there before his eyes. As he watched the final surge of each wave as it drained into the sand, the final thrust of mighty power that had come down the countless centuries, he was struck by the pathos of it all. At that very point, a grand pan-oceanic enterprise that spanned the world went awry and ended in annihilation.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow