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For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible. Dreams, memories, the sacred—they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.”
Kiyoaki now realized that a fanatical insistence on total independence was a disease, not of the flesh but of the mind.
History is a record of destruction. One must always make room for the next ephemeral crystal. For history, to build and to destroy are one and the same thing.
