Many academic Historians discuss the relative merits of chronological and thematic approaches to the writing of history. This debate is based upon a false dichotomy. Themes and chronology are not mutually exclusive, dates allow the historian to place events in sequential order, and themes are developed to analyze the evolution of historical trends. Each is required for the historian to maintain a clear perspective.
A short Goodreads Review of Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima that I wrote a little while ago. I have to say – I do not quite get the adoration that people have for this book on YouTube. People talk about it as a kind of masculine self-help book about mastering the “discipline of the steel”, weightlifting and weapons, and embracing your physical being and physical experience. The book does detail Mishima's journey to leave his room and transform himself through lifting steel, running, and fencing. Flirtations with the military, etc. Yet it isnt simply that, as the subtitle suggests "Art, Action and Ritual Death", it presents a worldview on relationship between word (spirit) and action (body) and their reconciliation in death. One of the notions that I was sympathetic to is that there is a problem of overindulging in introspection and the idea that the ‘surface’ of things might contain its own kind of depths (of experience) and that the ‘depth’ within oneself are a series ...
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