The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

was aware of the situation. Had any one of them
shown the slightest misgivings, in that instant it would
have been wiped out by my consciousness.
I have put together a delicate machine for feeling
how it would be if I were to feel like a human being.
The naturalized Englishman is more English than the
native Englishman, they say; and I have become more
of an expert on humanity than a human being. More, in
any case, than an eighteen-year-old. Imagination and
logic are my weapons, more precise than nature or
instinct or experience, quite waterproof in awareness
of and accommodation to probability. I have become
a specialist in humanity, as an entomologist might
become a specialist in South American beetles. With
odorless flowers I have explored the ways in which
human beings are captured by the odor of certain
flowers, caught up in certain feelings.
So it is to see. I have seen from the signal station
how an international freighter sets its sights from a
certain distance out at sea, and makes toward shore
at twelve and a half knots with the most urgent dreams
of home. That was mere probing, my eye was really
turned on an invisible realm far beyond the horizon.
What is it to see the invisible? That is the ultimate
vision, the denial at the end of all seeing, the eye’s
denial of itself.