Sublime

Rubaiyat.

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.

(It looks as if I shall end my days without ever having seen the Meiji Shrine, the statue of Kusunoki Masashige or the tombs of the Forty-Seven Ronin.)

I thought instead of the dead Tsuneko, and, longing for her, I wept. Of all the people I had ever known, that miserable Tsuneko really was the only one I loved.

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.

From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?

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.

I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perf

There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes.