Spring Snow

by Yukio Mishima

To take your own ideal and bend the world to it like that. Wouldn’t that be a remarkable force? It would be like holding the secret key to life right there in your hand, wouldn’t it?”

Oddly enough, living only for one’s emotions, like a flag obedient to the breeze, demands a way of life that makes one balk at the natural course of events, for this implies being altogether subservient to nature. The life of the emotions detests all constraints, whatever their origin, and thus, ironically enough, is apt eventually to fetter its own instinctive sense of freedom.