№954114[Quote]
We who live today, however, imagine death, but I wonder if we're even living. I was most intimate with death during the war. I was 20 years old when the war ended, so all my friends and I could think about was how and when we would die. We entered our 20s full of such thoughts. The youth of today, in contrast, may seek out thrills, and though they're not exactly afraid of death, there is not a tense existence in which death becomes the precondition to life. Therefore, in my own work, I naturally consider any of so called "weariness to life" or the idea that one can live for one's own sake alone, to be patently vulgar.