“To put it in a rather vulgar way, I had been dreaming about love in the firm belief that I could not be loved, but at the final stage I had substituted desire for love and felt a sort of relief. But in the end I had understood that desire itself demanded for its fulfillment that I should forget about the conditions of my existence, and that I should abandon what for me constituted the only barrier to love, namely the belief that I could not be loved. I had always thought of desire as being something clearer than it really is, and I had not realized that it required people to see themselves in a slightly dreamlike, unreal way.”
Quote by Yukio Mishima
Work
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is a novel by Japanese author Yukio Mishima, first published in 1956. It is based on the real-life burning of the Kinkaku-ji temple in Kyoto in 1950. The story follows Mizoguchi, a young man with a stutter and a deep admiration for the temple's beauty, who becomes a novice at the temple. His growing obsession with the temple's perfection and his internal conflicts with beauty, ugliness, and impermanence culminate in a dramatic and tragic decision. The novel explores themes of aestheticism, obsession, and the destructive nature of idealized beauty. more
Author
Yukio Mishima
Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author and playwright, a prominent figure in post-war Japanese literature. His works, characterized by a fusion of traditional Japanese aesthetics and modernist techniques, often explored themes of tradition, ritual, and the samurai code. more
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