The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

unhappiness. There is no tragedy and there is no
genius. Your confidence and your dreams are
groundless. If there is on this earth something
exceptional, special beauty or special evil, nature
finds it out and uproots it. We should all by now have
learned the hard lesson, that there are no ‘elect.’
“You thought, didn’t you, that you were a genius
beyond compensation. You thought of yourself, didn’t
you, as a beautiful little cloud of evil floating over
humanity.
“Mr. Honda saw it all the minute he saw your moles.
He decided in that instant that he must have you with
him, to save you from the danger. He thought that if he
left you as you were, if he left you to your ‘fate,’ you
would be killed by nature at twenty.
“He tried to save you by adopting you, by smashing
to bits your ‘godlike’ pride, by drilling into you the
world’s rules for culture and happiness, by making you
over into a perfectly ordinary young man. You did not
recognize that you had the same starting point as the
rest of us. The sign of your refusal to recognize was
those three moles. It was affection that made him
adopt you without telling you why he wanted to save
you. The affection, of course, of a man who knew too
much of the world.”
Tōru was more and more uneasy. “Why do you say I