I thought of Musashi’s Go Rin No Sho, the Book of Five Rings, which I’ve read many times. In his recounting of his over sixty sword duels, and of the half-dozen large-scale battles in which he participated, Musashi had never expressed doubt about the morality of his actions. He seemed to take it as a given that men fought, killed, and died, and I doubted he gave much more thought to any of this than he did to the fact that men breathed and ate and fucked and slept. The one was as natural, and immutable, as the other. What mattered was one’s proficiency.
