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By Root 475 0

in the walls and from under the eaves, but it had no appeal at all. I wasn’t especially frightened, I think. If you were to try putting on the mask just once, you too would surely understand; trying to suppress such acts of violence was meaningless and fatuous. For example, even the most fainthearted child can enjoy a horror movie calmly if he covers his face and looks through his fingers. Further, a heavily made-up woman is more easily seduced than one who wears no make-up. This is not restricted to sexual seduction; it is demonstrable, statistically, in cases of habitual shoplifters. People get excited about upholding discipline, or custom, or rules, but in the final analysis such things, depressingly, are merely houses on sand supported by a thin layer of skin, the real face.

Indeed, I was not frightened. From now on it would serve no purpose to hold back out of shame. Basically, the mask itself was the crystallization of shame. It may not be prohibited by law, but is there another act more reprehensible than disguising oneself with a mask unrecognizable as such? In short, even though I could imagine what the psychology of an arsonist might be, I myself was simply not one. However, I too became uneasy when I found that the single, apparently pure goal I had at last hit upon was unfortunately not what I had ordered. Since I could decide on no other suitable plan, there was nothing to be done about it. Even so, the plan would be better than doing nothing. But I could not possibly think of all those cravings, those throbbing tumors, as classifiable under “means.” It was too pitiful to have become so accustomed to frugality in freedom. Anyway, I shall suppress incendiarism for the time being.…

Just a minute. I realize I have made an important omission either deliberately or by accident in what I have written until now. If it were a question of illegal acts, there was another type of criminal I should have mentioned above: the bandit who attacks suddenly. If one accords a pure motive for arsonists, then there should be no question about doing the same for bandits. None at all. On the outside he is not so ostentatious as the arsonist, but in his heart he is no better than a murderer. Even so, could I have forgotten such a representative example? No, I had forgotten it precisely because it was representative. Didn’t the bandit escape me because he had more destructive motives than the arsonist, in whom I was not interested anyway?

The extroverted, unpacific type. My mask, which passed itself off as a hunter, drew back on hearing the words “destructive motives,” and in so doing could not help but show its origins. It may appear that I am repeating, but not because I am a coward. While cowardice is something to be denied, I do not particularly need to deny it. Looking into myself I could find not the slightest interest in either banditry or arson. The thousand volts of electricity that stimulated the mask was completely different from destruction; it was something that coiled closely round the mask and had a character I might well call the direct opposite of destructive.

Of course, it would be too much to say that I had absolutely no destructive motives in me. In daydreams, I was more than once carried away by impulses such as wanting to tear your skin from your face to make you experience the same agony as I, to release into the air poison gasses that would paralyze the optic nerves and blind the whole world. Indeed, I remember having often used similar harsh language in these notes, but before the mask was made. After it was completed I had the feeling, though still I made similar protests, that a delicate transformation had taken place. Perhaps it had. Precisely because it had, the mask wanted to expend its freedom on something quite different than destruction. It was not a negative something, such as letting the mask help dispose of criminal evidence by destroying it. Oh, come on. What do I really want to say? Do I want such classical harmonies as love, or friendship, or mutual understanding? Or do I want to suck on the