BGM: The Beatles - When I'm Sixty-Four
This morning, I read two interesting blog articles about aging and tried to think about my case. As I have written in these journals, I will be 49 this year (when Souseki Natsume passed away.) How can I accept the fact that I am already not young? How can I get aged properly and get along with this rapid flow of time? I remember some interesting masterpieces of literature which tried to explore this issue. Just as Yasunari Kawabata's "House of the Sleeping Beauties [川端康成『眠れる美女』]" and Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" (this novel shows me an aged guy's crisis personally...)
After thinking about that, I started reading Yukio Mishima's evergreen masterpiece "Confession of a Mask [三島由紀夫『仮面の告白』]". I've remembered what I could think when I was young... at my young period, I couldn't see this Mishima's novel's greatness. I can't tell why, but this novel has been too fresh, and also too brainy for me to enjoy. I heard Mishima had written this novel in his 20s, that could bring me that fresh touch.
Mishima, and also my adorable, great father of the literature world Haruki Murakami... They had found their own themes to write about in their lives. When I was still a wannabe who was trying to write my novel, I had a huge jealousy toward these people who had already been able to find their missions which had enabled them to express their truths. As for me, now I have understood that I must have needed to build/create a certain strong self-esteem within me... that mental core could make me write even though they could end as crap.
When I was a teenager, I was into Haruki's great, literally "cool" and "sophisticated" wonderland which doesn't have any attachment/connections among people too much(I even wished I could live as a resident in that land.) But now, at 48, I have been finding that our closer attachment must be important. As you see, I am not a literature critic. But, for me, various books might have been a collection of trials that the authors have tried to connect themselves to the world to find out any clues to live their/our lives properly.
