The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima Page B

when that dream was destroyed by the clear realism of Mother's judgment, I reverted to the second ambition, until in the end I wearied myself by constantly going back and forth in my thoughts and, as a result, a large red swelling appeared at the base of my neck.
    I left it alone. The swelling become firmly rooted and began to press on me from the back of my neck with a heavy, hot force. In my fitful sleep, I dreamed that a pure golden light was growing on my neck, surrounding the back of my head with a sort of elliptical halo and gradually expanding. But when I awoke, this turned out to have been merely the pain from my virulent swelling.
    Finally I came down with a temperature and had to go to bed. The Superior sent me to sec a surgeon. The surgeon, who was dressed in a national uniform with gaiters, diagnosed my swelling by the simple name of Flunkel. Not wanting to use any alcohol, he disinfected his knife by holding it over a flame and then applied it to my neck. I groaned. The hot, burdensome world burst open in the back of my head, and I felt it shriveling up and collapsing.
    The war ended. All that I was thinking about, as I listened in the factory to the Imperial Rescript announcing the termina tion of hostilities, was the Golden Temple.
    As soon as I returned from the factory, I naturally hurried to the front of the Golden Temple. On the path that was used by visitors to the temple, the pebbles were baking in the midsummer sun, and one after another stuck to the rough rubber soles of my gym shoes.
    In Tokyo, after people had heard the Rescript, they probably went and stood in front of the Imperial Palace; here great numbers went and wept before the gates of the uninhabited Kyoto Palace. Kyoto is full of shrines and temples where people can go and cry on occasions like this. The priests must all have done rather well that day. Yet despite the great role of the Golden Temple, no one came to visit it that day.
    Thus it was that only my shadow could be seen on the baking pebbles. To describe the situation properly, I should say that I was standing on one side and the Golden Temple on the other. And from the moment that I set eyes on the temple that day, I could feel that “our" relationship had already undergone a change. When it came to such things as the shock of defeat or national grief, the Golden Temple was in its element; at such times it was transcendent, or at least pretended to be transcendent. Until today, the Golden Temple had not been like this. Without doubt, the fact that it had in the end escaped being burned down in an air raid and was now out of danger had served to restore its earlier expression, an expression that said: "I have been here since olden times and I shall remain here forever.”
    It sat there in utter silence, like some elegant but useless piece of furniture, with the antique gold foil or its interior perfectly protected by the lacquer of the summer sun that doubled the outer walls. Great, empty display shelves placed before the burning green of the forest. What ornamental objects could one put on such shelves? Nothing would fit their measurements but something like a fantastically large incense burner, or an absolutely colossal nihility. But the Golden Temple had entirely lost such things; it had suddenly washed away its essence and now displayed a strangely empty form, l he most peculiar thing was that of all the various times when the Golden Temple had shown me its beauty, this time was the most beautiful of all. Never had the temple displayed so hard a beauty—a beauty that transcended my own image, yes, that transcended the entire world of reality, a beauty that bore no relation to any form of evanescence! Never before had its beauty shone like this, rejecting every sort of meaning.
    It is no exaggeration to say that as I gazed at the temple, my legs trembled and my forehead was covered with cold beads of perspiration. On a former occasion when I had returned to the country