Hideaki Satoh > Recent Status Updates

Yeah I'm ready to read the analyses of this play.

"Cruel separation guarded the purity of emotion. The pangs of being apart were transformed into quiet joy. Danger aroused the sensual. Uncertainty fostered dreams."

"There flashed through Otaguro’s prayerful entreaty terrible phantasms: glinting swords cutting down the wicked, blood spilling out on every side. And beyond the blood, what was pure, just, and honest took form, like the blue line of the distant sea."

"Yet the eyes' function is not to see but to weep; and really to see we must
close them: that is the condition of ecstasy, of the one revealing vision, whereas perception is exhausted in the horror of the déjá vu of an irreparable recognition scene which occurred at the beginning..."

"It follows that we are all sick, and that each of us would require a Sahara in order to scream our lungs out, or the shores of a wild and elegiac sea in order to mingle with its fierce lamentations our even fiercer ones."

"Love’s one function is to help us endure those cruel and incommensurable Sunday afternoons which torment us for the rest of the week—and for eternity. Without the allurement of the ancestral spasm, we should require a thousand eyes for hidden tears, or else nails to bite, mile-long nails. . . . How else kill this time which no longer passes? On those interminable Sundays the disease of being is utterly plain."

"Love is the drama of completion, of unification. Personal and boundless, it leads to deliverance from the tyranny of the ego. Sex is impersonal, and may or may not be identified with love. Sex can strengthen and deepen love, or work destructively."

"With the birth of the questioning faculty, sorrow set in. Our world, hitherto so natural, so marvelous, slipped its moorings. Henceforth, nothing was absolutely so any more: everything could be proved – and disproved."

"In the course of disintegration, a process which may go on for centuries, life loses all significance. An unearthly activity, manifested with equal ferocity in the pursuits of scholars, thinkers, men of science as in the doings of militarists, politicians and plunderers, screens the ever waning presence of the living flame. This abnormal activity is itself the sign of approaching death."

"But no: I’ll go on to where the air runs out, I’ll go to where the great gale leaps away howling, I’ll go to where the void begins to curve, I’ll go where my breath takes me. Does my breath deliver me to God? I am so pure that I know nothing. I only know one thing: I don’t need to pity God. Or do I?"

"Because this past belonged to both of them and they had forgotten the bitterness of childhood because childhood, once it’s over, is always bittersweet and even makes you nostalgic."

"Meanwhile the clouds are white and the sky is all blue. Why so much
God. Why not a little for men."

"And — and don’t forget that the structure of the atom cannot be seen
but is nonetheless known. I know about lots of things I’ve never seen. And
so do you. You can’t show proof of the truest thing of all, all you can do is
believe. Weep and believe."

"At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world."

"[...] viết thực ra là nỗ lực tiên nghiệm, khác với cuộc sống, có lẽ vì nó cố gắng muốn thấy, cuộc sống muốn gì, vì vậy, vì không thể làm khác, nó nhắc lại, lặp lại cuộc sống, như thể viết cũng chính là cuộc sống, cho dù không đúng thế, không hề, hoàn toàn khác, không so sánh được, đấy là sự thất bại, nếu ta bắt đầu viết về cuộc sống, từ đầu."

"Tôi muốn, tôi không muốn, không làm khác được, nếu tôi viết, tôi nhớ lại, cần phải nhớ lại, dù không hiểu tại sao cần nhớ lại. Chắc chắn vì tri thức, tri thức của sự hồi tưởng, chúng ta sống, để nhớ ra tri thức của mình, vì chúng ta không quên cái chúng ta đã biết, đừng sợ, các bạn, không phải từ "nghĩa vụ đạo đức”, không, đơn giản chỉ vì chúng ta không có cách nào, chúng ta không thể quên."

"Thay vì tự sát, người ta đi làm." - Thomas Bernhard.

"and that is why it is such a joy for me that I can practice Seiobo; Seiobo is the emissary who arrives and says I am not the desire for peace, I am peace itself; Seiobo arrives and says do not be afraid, for the universe of peace is not the rainbow of yearning; the universe, the real universe - already exists."

I lived for this book, truly.

Cũng giống như tình yêu vĩ đại, mà mỗi chúng ta chỉ yêu một lần trong đời, thì "Tây Vương Mẫu giáng hạ" cũng là cuốn sách mà mỗi con người chỉ có một lần đọc duy nhất trước muôn lần ghé thăm.

"[..] for the icons explained to them clearly that the world was at an end, and that this world had an end; and that if they kissed the icon and looked into it, then they would be assured that something exists more miraculous than the miraculous itself, that there is mercy and there is forgiveness and there is hope, and there is strength in faith,"

"There's no doubt that he'll be heading straight for tragedy. It will be beautiful, of course, but should he throw his whole life away as a sacrificial offering to such a fleeting beauty—like a bird in flight glimpsed from a window?”

Lại một cuộc truy vấn nữa của Mishima về tình yêu lứa đôi, cứ như thể huỷ diệt nó một lần vốn là không đủ. Muốn chăm sóc cũng là yêu, mà muốn huỷ diệt cũng là yêu; tình yêu là gì nếu không phải là chữ không. Tôi là không, bạn cũng là không, chúng ta là những kẻ chẳng thể đánh vần nổi chữ "yêu" cho nên hồn.

“Separation is painful, but so is its opposite. And if being together brings joy, then it is only proper that separation should do the same in its own way.”

Kim Các Tự, sắc đẹp của những vị công chúa, những vẻ đẹp tà ác mà con người chỉ nên ngắm nhìn từ xa thay vì dự phần, bởi rồi đến lúc ta sẽ buộc phải chọn huỷ diệt nó hoặc để nó huỷ diệt ta.

Mishima viết đẹp và tinh tế quá. Khen ngợi sao cho vừa bây giờ.

“For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible."