Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

IT was well said of a certain German book that "er lasst sich nicht lesen" —it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes —die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged. Not long ago, about the closing in of an evening in autumn, I sat at the large bow window of the D__ Coffee-House in London. For some months I had been ill in health, but was now convalescent, and, with returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui —moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs —the xxxxx xx xxxx xxxx [Greek text] —and the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its every-day condition, as does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz, the mad and flimsy rhe