Sun And Steel - Yukio Mishima

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This is the combine with the pages to make more words with the copies. Enjoy. 

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Of late, I have come to sense within myself an accumulation of all kinds of things that cannot
find adequate expression via an objective artistic form such as the novel. A lyric poet of twenty
might manage it, but I am twenty no longer, and have never been a poet at any rate. I have
groped around, therefore, for some other form more suited to such personal utterances and
have come up with a kind of hybrid between confession and criticism, a subtly equivocal mode
that one might call "confidential criticism."
I see it as a twilight genre between the night of confession and the daylight of criticism. The
"I" with which I shall occupy myself will not be the "I" that relates back strictly to myself, but
something else, some residue, that remains after all the other words I have uttered have flowed
back into me, something that neither relates back nor flows back.
As I pondered the nature of that "I," I was driven to the conclusion that the "I" in question
corresponded precisely with the physical space that I occupied. What I was seeking, in short,
was a language of the body
If my self was my dwelling, then my body resembled an orchard that surrounded it. I could
either cultivate that orchard to its capacity or leave it for the weeds to run riot in. I was free to
choose, but the freedom was not as obvious as it might seem. Many people, indeed, go so far
as to refer to the orchards of their dwellings as "destiny."
One day, it occurred to me to set about cultivating my orchard for all I was worth. For my
purpose, I used sun and steel. Unceasing sunlight and implements fashioned of steel became
the chief elements in my husbandry. Little by little, the orchard began to bear fruit, and thoughts
of the body came to occupy a large part of my consciousness.
All this did not occur, of course, overnight. Nor did it begin without the existence of some
deep-lying motive.
When I examine closely my early childhood, I realise that my memory of words reaches back
far farther than my memory of the flesh. In the average person, I imagine, the body precedes
language. In my case, words came first of all; then—belatedly, with every appearance of
extreme reluctance, and already clothed in concepts—came the flesh. It was already, as goes
without saying, sadly wasted by words.
First comes the pillar of plain wood, then the white ants that feed on it. But for me, the white
ants were there from the start, and the pillar of plain wood emerged tardily, already half eaten
away.
Let the reader not chide me for comparing my own trade to the white ant. In its essence, any
art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away—of their corrosive function—just
as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid. Yet the simile is not accurate enough;
for the copper and the nitric acid used in etching are on a par with each other, both being
extracted from nature, while the relation of words to reality is not that of the acid to the plate.
Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in
their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words themselves will be
corroded too. It might be more appropriate, in fact, to liken their action to that of excess
stomach fluids that digest and gradually eat away the stomach itself.
Many people will express disbelief that such a process could already be at work in a person's
earliest years. But that, beyond doubt, is what happened to me personally, thereby laying the
ground for two contradictory tendencies within myself. One was the determination to press--