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:
“Uncle Ben’s brass bullet-mould
And powder horn, and Major Bogan’s face
Above the fire, in the half-light, plainly said
There’s naught to kill but the animated dead;”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“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)