Status Updates From Het Gouden Paviljoen

Death’s sky was bright and seemed to me like the sky of life. My gloomy thoughts all left me. This world was now devoid of agony.

Even after I had returned to the temple I did not tire of looking at my two acquisitions. I took the pocketknife out of its case and licked the blade. The steel immediately clouded over and the clear coolness against my tongue was followed by a remote suggestion of sweetness.

On my way back to the temple I thought about the purchases which I had made that evening. They were exciting purchases. Although I had bought the drugs and the knife for the remote eventuality of having to die, I was so pleased with them that I could not help wondering whether this was not how a man must feel who has acquired a new house and who is making plans for his future life.

Inasmuch as flies love putrefaction, had Mariko begun to putrefy? Did the girl’s total absence of belief connote putrefaction? Was it because she inhabited an absolute world of her own that the fly had visited her?

Mariko was devoid of belief. If there had been an earthquake directly before her eyes, she would not have believed it. If the entire world were to collapse, this girl alone would probably be spared. For Mariko believed only in things that happened according to her own private logic.This logic did not allow for any collapse of the world and accordingly nothing could possibly provide an opportunity for Mariko to think.

I only wished that Mariko would experience some premonition from the fateful fact of having met me. I wished that she would come just a little closer to the knowledge that she was lending a hand in the destruction of the world.

I would enter into the emotions that she had created. The ideal thing from her point of view would be that I should respond by bursting into tears.
But I did not do so. Instead, I abruptly snatched the copy of Crime and Puhishment from the bedside and thrust it under her nose.

Mariko greeted me with the same smile as yesterday. The smile was the same, but “yesterday” had not left the slightest trace. Her friendliness towards me was the friendliness that people show to a stranger they happen to glimpse at some street corner.

I felt that at some time and at some place which I could no longer remember—perhaps with Uiko—I had known a more violent form of carnal joy, a sensuality that had made my entire body seem numb. This provided the source of all my later joys, and indeed those joys were merely tantamount to scooping out handfuls of water from the past.

One of the many ways in which I differ from other people is that the acts which I perform in my real life are inclined to end as faithful copies of what is in my imagination. Or, rather, I should say not imagination but the memory of my own well-springs. I could never get over the feeling that every single experience that I might enjoy in my life had already been experienced by me previously in a more brilliant form.

In the distance a feeling that had so far shunned me gushed up and presently collapsed. Then I was overcome by the feeling that everything had left me in the lurch. Yet it was not sufficient to make me weep.

Besides,this was the first time that I'd ever seen another person’s eyes so close to me.The law of distance that regulated my world had been destroyed.A stranger had fearlessly impinged on my existence.The heat of a stranger’s body&the cheap perfume on its skin combined to inundate me by slow degrees until I was completely immersed in it all.For the first time I saw that someone else’s world could melt away like this

From the point of view of knowledge, beauty is never a consolation. It may be a woman, it may be one’s wife, but it’s never a consolation. Yet from the marriage between this beautiful thing which is never a consolation, on the one hand, and knowledge, on the other, something is born, It is as evanescent as a bubble and utterly hopeless. Yet something is born. That something is what people call art!”

But there is no such thing as individual knowledge, a particular knowledge belonging to one special person or group. Knowledge is the sea of humanity, the field of humanity, the general condition of human existence... Well, beauty-beauty that you love so much—is an illusion of the remaining part, the excessive part, which has been consigned to knowledge. It is an illusion of the “other way to bear life”

“Action, you say. But don’t you see that the beauty of this world, which means so much to you, craves sleep and that in order to sleep it must be protected by knowledge?

Let’s put it this way—human beings possess the weapon of knowledge in order to make life bearable.For animals such things aren’t necessary.Animals don’t need knowledge or anything of the sort to make life bearable.But human beings do need something,& with knowledge they can make the very intolerableness of life a weapon,though at the same time that intolerableness is not reduced in the slightest.

What transforms this world is-knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge along is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeaole and at the same time are constantly being transformed.