Human Beings - They Go On Being

…the Samurai Ethic Is A Political Science Of The Heart, Designed To Control Such Discouragement And Fatigue In Order To Avoid Showing Them To Others. It Was Thought More Important To Look Healthy Than To Be Healthy, And More Important To Seem Bold And Daring Than To Be So. This View Of Morality, Since It Is Physiologically Based On The Special Vanity Peculiar To Men, Is Perhaps The Supreme Male View Of Morality.

Isao Had Never Felt That He Might Want To Be A Woman. He Had Never Wished For Anything Else But To Be A Man, Live In A Manly Way, Die A Manly Death. To Be Thus A Man Was To Give Constant Proof Of One's Manliness-to Be More A Man Today Than Yesterday, More A Man Tomorrow Than Today. To Be A Man Was To Forge Ever Upward Toward The Peak Of Manhood, There To Die Amid The White Snows Of That Peak.

This Is A Photograph, So It Is As You See: There Are No Lies And No Deceptions. One Can Detect Here, Elevated To An Incomparably Higher Level, The Same Pathetic Emotional Appeal That Lies Concealed In Every Fake Spiritualist Photograph, Every Pornographic Photograph; One Comes To Suspect That The Strange, Disturbing Emotional Appeal Of The Photographic Art Consists Solely In That Same Repeated Refrain: This Is A True Ghost... This Is A Photograph, So It Is As You See: There Are No Lies, No Deceptions.

We Had Stretched Out Our Arms To Each Other And Supported Something In Our Joined Hands, But This Thing We Were Holding Was Like A Sort Of Gas That Exists When You Believe In Its Existence And Disappears When You Doubt. The Task Of Supporting It Seems Simple At First Glance, But Actually Requires An Ultimate Refinement Of Calculation And A Consummate Skill.

He Was In A Room Of The Gesshuuji, Which He Had Thought It Would Be Impossible To Visit. The Approach Of Death Had Made The Visit Easy, Had Unloosed The Weight That Held Him In The Depths Of Being. It Was Even A Comfort To Think, From The Light Repose The Struggle Up The Hill Had Brought Him, That Kiyoaki, Struggling Against Illness Up That Same Road, Had Been Given Wings To Soar With By The Denial That Awaited Him.