I Still Have No Way To Survive

Men Had Been Living A Proud Life, Having Felt No Need For The Spirit-until Christianity Invented It.

An Ugliness Unfurled In The Moonlight And Soft Shadow And Suffused The Whole World. If I Were An Amoeba, He Thought, With An Infinitesimal Body, I Could Defeat Ugliness. A Man Isn’t Tiny Or Giant Enough To Defeat Anything.

For A Long Time I Had Not Approached The Forbidden Fruit Called Happiness, But It Was Now Tempting Me With A Melancholy Persistence. I Felt As Though Sonoko Were An Abyss Above Which I Stood Poised.

However, As Words Become Particularized, And As Men Begin - In However Small A Way - To Use Them In Personal, Arbitrary Ways, So Their Transformation Into Art Begins. It Was Words Of This Kind That, Descending On Me Like A Swarm Of Winged Insects, Seized On My Individuality And Sought To Shut Me Up Within It. Nevertheless, Despite The Enemy's Depredations Upon My Person, I Turned Their Universality - At Once A Weapon And A Weakness - Back On Them, And To Some Extent Succeeded In Using Words To Universalize To My Own Individuality.

A Samurai Is A Total Human Being, Whereas A Man Who Is Completely Absorbed In His Technical Skill Has Degenerated Into A ‘function’, One Cog In A Machine.