No Longer Human

Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes. That is the one and only thing I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell. Everything passes.

And now I had become a madman. Even if released, I would be forever branded on the forehead with the word “madman,” or perhaps, “reject.” Disqualified as a human being. I had now ceased utterly to be a human being.

Is immaculate trustfulness a sin?

For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people’s faces, Yoshiko’s immaculate trustfulness seemed clean and pure, like a waterfall among green leaves.

God, I ask you. Is trustfulness a sin?

The “world,” after all, was still a place of bottomless horror. It was by no means a place of childlike simplicity where everything could be settled by a single then-and-there decision.

Rubaiyat.

There is no disputing the accurate, scientific fact that millions of germs are floating, swimming, wriggling everywhere. At the same time, however, if you ignore them completely they lose all possible connection with yourself, and at once become nothing more than vanishing “ghosts of science.”

. . et puis on recommence encore le lendemain avec seulement la même règle que la veille et qui est d’éviter les grandes joies barbares de même que les grandes douleurs comme un crapaud contorne une pierre sur son chemin. . .