W: LP: ORP: YM: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

I finally finished Yukio Mishima's "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion" translated by Ivan Morris. As all the commentators have pointed out, this a fictionalized account of the person who burned down the the Golden Temple in Kyoto, Japan.

This story is told in first-person narrative style which is appropriate considering that the main character, the narrator, a Buddhist priest in training, obsesses about himself. My limited understanding of Buddhism is that one must empty oneself of self to attain enlightenment. Never-the-less, the main character recounts his personal biography from his childhood through university schooling to the fateful point of performing an ultimate nihilistic act. For him this is the burning of the Golden Temple where he was an acolyte. For the narrator, this temple personifies beauty, but has a shackling obsessive effect on this psychotic self-filled individual. It reminds me of the following quote by Albert Camus:

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

This obsession with beauty and the circular existential struggle between meaning and meaninglessness within the mind of the narrator drives him, in his own perverted course of logic, to the conclusion that he must burn down the temple to free himself and truly live.
It reminds me of the darker side of the philosophy of Existentialism and some of Nietzsche's ideas. But it occurs to me that many who repudiate the moral consciousness written in their hearts by the Creator God, find only confusion and chaos of mind, and then the arrogant "self" stands up to defiantly act out. Lucifer becomes Satan; so everyone who tries to find a meaningful self apart from God only succeeds in performing criminal rebellion. The narrator wants to truly live, but in his lostness and depravity, only destructively anti-lives.

But after having summarized the novel above as I have, I do want to point out that there are poignant shards of insight and beauty mixed into the horrifying logic of nihilism. Take a look at these passages:
This first one is a piece from the funeral for the narrator's father:

Father's face was buried in the early summer flowers. There was something gruesome about the utter freshness of those flowers. It was as though they were peering down into the bottom of a well. For a dead man's face falls to an infinite depth beneath the surface which the face possessed when it was alive, leaving nothing for the survivors to see but the frame of a mask; it falls so deep, indeed, that it can never be pulled back to the surface. A dead man's face can tell us better than anything else in this world how far removed we are from the true existence of physical substance, how impossible it is for us to lay hands on the way in which this substance exists. This was the first time that I had been confronted by a situation like this in which a spirit is transformed by death into mere physical substance; and now I felt that I was gradually beginning to understand why it was that spring flowers, the sun, my desk, the schoolhouse, pencils--all physical substance, indeed--had always seemed so cold to me, had always seemed to exist so far away from myself.

This next one is from toward the end of the story and is an interesting conception of the nature of knowledge:

Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed. You may ask what good it does us. Let's put it this way--human beings possess the weapon of knowledge in order to make life bearable. For animals such things aren't necessary. Animals don't need knowledge or anything of the sort to make life bearable. But human beings do need something, and with knowledge they can make the very intolerableness of life a weapon, though at the same time that intolerableness is not reduced in the slightest. That's all there is to it.

Anyway, I do recommend reading this novel just for the thought provoking nature in which the story is told, but for those without hope this story might be a bit too depressing.