Status Updates From Het Gouden Paviljoen

“What about sexual desire? Where does that fit in?
“Sexual desire? Well, that’s halfway between. It’s a matter of going round and round in a vicious circle from human beings to stone and back to human beings, like a game of blind man’s buff.”

“You’re damned Buddhist in your views, aren’t you?” I said.
“What’s it got to do with Buddhism or any stuff like that?” said Kashiwagi. “Nobility, culture, what people consider aesthetic—the reality of all those things is barren and inorganic. It isn’t the Ryuan Temple that you see, but simply a pile of stones. Philosophy, art—it’s all a lot of stones. The only really organic concern that people have is politics.

“Political power and the power of wealth result in splendid graves. Really impressive graves, you know. Such creatures never had any imagination while they lived, and quite naturally their graves don’t leave any room for imagination either. But noble people live only on the imaginations of themselves and others, and so they leave graves like this one which inevitably stir one’s imagination.

This temple, by just standing there as it did, was a controlling force, a regulating force. The more that the surrounding noise increased, the more the Golden Temple-that asymmetrical, delicate structure, with the Sosci on one side, and above it the Kukyocho, which abruptly tapered off at the top-acted like a filter that transforms muddy into clear water.

The people who cleared away the dead bodies after the air raids all had gentle, cheerful expressions. To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It’s never at such times that We become cruel or bloodthirsty. No, it’s on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become cruel.

But I am sure you understand that after that I was able to believe with perfect peace of mind that ‘love was impossible.’ I was released from uneasiness. I was released from love. The world had come to a permanent standstill and at the same time it had arrived. Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning ‘love’ in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition.

..what is known in this world as uneasiness could only strike me as child’s play.There could be no uneasiness in my case.That I existed in this form was a definite fact, as definite as that the sun and the earth existed,or that beautiful birds and ugly crocodiles existed.The world was immobile like a tombstone.
Not the slightest uneasiness,not the slightest foothold—therein lay the basis of my original way of living.

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,