No Longer Human ( PDFDrive )

54
had this mentality, after repeated wounds and intimidations
at the hands of the apparitions called
human beings, have often come to believe in phantasms—they
plainly saw monsters in broad daylight,
in the midst of nature. And they did not fob people
ofif with clowning; they did their best to depict these
monsters just as they had appeared. Takcichi was
right: they had dared to paint pictures of devils.
These, I thought, would be my friends in the future.
I was so excited I could have wept.
"I'm going to paint too. I'm going to paint pictures
of ghosts and devils and horses out of hell." My
voice as I spoke these words to Takeichi was lowered
to a barely audible whisper, why I don't know.
Ever since elementary school days I enjoyed drawing
and looking at pictures. But my pictures failed
to win the reputation among my fellow students that
my comic stories did. I have never had the least trust
in the opinions of human beings, and my stories
represented to me nothing more than the clown's
gesture of greeting to his audience; they enraptured
all of my teachers but for me they were devoid of the
slightest interest. Only to my paintings, to the depiction
of the object (my cartoons were something else
again) did I devote any real efforts of my original
though childish style. The copybooks for drawing
we used at school were dreary; the teacher's pictures