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Mirrors As Augury

A type of cipher seemed to operate in my general experience of life. As in a corridor of mirrors, a single image is reflected again and again to an endless depth. Things that I had seen in the past were clearly reflected on those that I encountered for the first time, and I felt that I was being led by such resemblances into the inner recesses of the corridor, into some fathomless inner chamber. We do not collide with our destiny all of a sudden. The man who later in life is to be executed is constantly—every time that he sees a telegraph pole on his way to work, every time that he passes a railway crossing – drawing an image in his mind of the execution site, and is becoming familiar with that image.

—Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

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