Major Themes
Some biographers consider Tōru and Honda to be the author's self-portraits.
- The shoddiness of modernity
- The emptiness of old age
- Calculation versus spontaneous action
- Ivory towers
- Innocent ardency + excellence = beauty
- The inescapably physical nature of the concept of beauty
- Admiration of "men of action" as a sublimated voyeurism
- Suicide as the annihilation of a hated world
- Suicide as a way of "establishing" oneself (Furusawa's anecdote in ch.18 of the mouse who drowns itself in a laundry tub so that the cat cannot eat it)
- The vastness of the Buddhist universe
Read more about this topic: The Decay Of The Angel
Famous quotes containing the words major and/or themes:
“You should hurry up ... and acquire the cigar habit. It’s one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)