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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: disintegrations of Meiji (1). That old cemetery behind my garden would be a
suitable place. Everything there is beautiful with a beauty of exceeding
and startling queerness; each tree and stone has been shaped by some old,
old ideal which no longer exists in any living brain; even the shadows are
not of this time and sun, but of a world forgotten, that never knew steam
or electricity or magnetism or -- kerosene oil! Also in the boom of the big
bell there is a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely
far-away from all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind
stirrings of them make me afraid,-- deliciously afraid. Never do I hear
that billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in
the abyssal part of my ghost,-- a sensation as of memories struggling to
Kwaidan |
