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The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir

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Dee Williams

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“What did Kiyoaki mean by his question? If one were forced to hazard a guess, it would be that he was trying to say that he had no interest in anything at all. He thought of himself as a thorn, a small, poisonous thorn jabbed into the workmanlike hand of his family. And this was his fate simply because he had acquired little elegance. A mere fifty years before, the Matsugaes had been a sturdy, upright samurai family, no more, eking out a frugal existence in the provinces. But in a brief span of time, their fortunes had soared. By Kiyoake’s time, the first traces of refinement were threatening to take hold on a family that, unlike the court of nobility, had enjoyed centuries of immunity to the virus of elegance. And Kiyoake, like an ant that senses the approaching flood, was experiencing the first intimations of his family’s rapid collapse. His elegance was the thorn. And he was well aware that his aversion to coarseness, his delight in refinement, were futile; he was a plant without roots. Without meaning to undermine his family, without wanting to violate its traditions, he was condemned to do so by his very nature. And this poison would stunt his own life as it destroyed his family. The handsome young man felt that this futility typified his existence. (p13.)”

NihilismSuperficialityRootlessness
Book:Spring Snow
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“Modern man is an island, in a historical sense. Every society born of revolution is an island, and it is an island that floats, like a thin film on the surface of history. He is always moving, disconnected from all that came before him, and never holding still long enough to strike the roots necessary to pass something on to those who will come after.”

RevolutionTraditionModernityRootlessness
Book:The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought
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