Amid The Moon And The Stars, Amid

…the Samurai Ethic Is A Political Science Of The Heart, Designed To Control Such Discouragement And Fatigue In Order To Avoid Showing Them To Others. It Was Thought More Important To Look Healthy Than To Be Healthy, And More Important To Seem Bold And Daring Than To Be So. This View Of Morality, Since It Is Physiologically Based On The Special Vanity Peculiar To Men, Is Perhaps The Supreme Male View Of Morality.

Was I Ignorant, Then, When I Was Seventeen? I Think Not. I Knew Everything. A Quarter-century's Experience Of Life Since Then Has Added Nothing To What I Knew. The One Difference Is That At Seventeen I Had No 'realism'.

Possessing By Letting Go Of Things Was A Secret Of Ownership Unknown To Youth.

Time Is What Matters. As Time Goes By, You And I Will Be Carried Inexorably Into The Mainstream Of Our Period, Even Though We’re Unaware Of What It Is. And Later, When They Say That Young Men In The Early Taisho Era Thought, Dressed, Talked, In Such And Such A Way, They’ll Be Talking About You And Me. We’ll All Be Lumped Together…. In A Few Decades, People Will See You And The People You Despise As One And The Same, A Single Entity.

Again And Again, The Cicada's Untiring Cry Pierced The Sultry Summer Air Like A Needle At Work On Thick Cotton Cloth.