At the moment I am full of life, my whole body overflowing with youth and strength. It seems impossible that I shall be dead in three hours’ time. An… - Yukio Mishima

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At the moment I am full of life, my whole body overflowing with youth and strength. It seems impossible that I shall be dead in three hours’ time. And yet...”
When someone seeks to tell the truth, words always falter in this way. I can almost see him now, fumbling for words: not from shyness, nor from fear, for the naked truth inevitably produces this verbal stumbling; but, rather, as a sign of a certain rough quality about truth itself. The young man in question had no long-drawn-out void left in which to await the absolute, nor did he have time to wind things up with words in a leisurely way. As he hurtled towards death, his final everyday phrases seized on a moment when the feeling for life, like chloroform in the strange headiness it produces, had temporarily benumbed his spirit’s awareness of the end, and, like a well-loved dog leaping up at its master, came rushing out upon him, only to be dashed rudely aside.