— Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima explores the tortured mind of a young man obsessed with beauty, perfection, and the unattainable idea of eternity. The novel, haunting and poetic, unravels a deep existential truth: the impossibility of living fully in the messy impermanence of life while simultaneously clinging to the fixed ideals of the eternal. When Mishima writes, “For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other,” he encapsulates one of the core struggles of human existence: the tension between the eternal and the ephemeral, between ideals and reality.
The Allure of Eternity
Eternity — the idea of something perfect, unchanging, and everlasting — is deeply seductive. It offers the illusion of control, of permanence in a world that constantly shifts beneath our feet. The Golden Pavilion, the novel’s central symbol, represents this seductive idea. To the protagonist, Mizoguchi, the temple is not just a beautiful building; it is an ideal, a flawless embodiment of beauty that transcends time.
In longing to “touch eternity,” Mizoguchi mirrors the universal human desire for permanence. We seek to capture moments, preserve memories, and build legacies that outlast our brief lifetimes. Art, architecture, religion, and love are all, in many ways, attempts to grasp at eternity. They are ways of saying, “Here is something that will not die, even though I must.”
But Mishima, through Mizoguchi’s descent into obsession and destruction, warns us that such a desire can become poisonous. When we seek eternity too desperately, we lose touch with life itself — with its chaos, its imperfections, and its transience.
The Reality of Life
Life, by its nature, is fleeting. It is filled with imperfection, decay, and inevitable loss. Unlike eternity, life is alive because it changes. People grow older, dreams evolve, beauty fades, and everything that once seemed solid eventually transforms or disappears.
To live is to accept this impermanence. It is to find beauty not in what lasts forever, but in what is vulnerable and temporary. In the Japanese tradition of wabi-sabi, there is a reverence for the imperfect, the incomplete, and the transient. Wabi-sabi teaches that the most profound beauty lies in the acceptance of life’s impermanence, not in the futile attempt to freeze it in time.
Mizoguchi’s tragedy lies in his inability to reconcile this truth. Instead of embracing the living, breathing imperfections of the world around him, he worships an idea of perfection so absolute that it ultimately isolates him from the real experiences of living. His worship of the temple — his fixation on its eternal beauty — drives him to destroy it, proving Mishima’s grim insight: when we cling too tightly to eternal ideals, we risk destroying the very life we long to transcend.
The Impossible Balance
Mishima’s quote — that it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other — strikes at the heart of a paradox we all face. We want both. We want to experience the raw, vivid aliveness of the present while also preserving it forever. We want the thrill of love without the heartbreak of loss. We want the pride of achievement without the fear that time will erode its meaning. We want to touch both the ever-changing and the unchanging at once.
But Mishima reminds us that this is impossible. To truly live, we must let go of eternity. We must immerse ourselves in the uncertainty, the imperfection, and the fleeting beauty of life. Eternity, as we imagine it, is static. Life is dynamic. To cling to eternity is to step out of the river of life, to freeze oneself in place, detached from the natural rhythms of change and growth.
This is not to say that ideals are worthless. Dreams, visions of beauty, aspirations toward truth and meaning — these are essential parts of the human spirit. But they must serve life, not replace it. When we allow our ideals to dominate our experience of reality, we stop living. We become prisoners of impossible standards, unable to appreciate the flawed and fragile beauty that is all around us.
Mishima’s Own Reflection
Mishima’s life and work often grappled with these tensions. He was a man who sought to fuse aesthetics and action, beauty and death, eternity and life. His dramatic death — a carefully staged act of political protest and personal mythology — was, in many ways, his own final statement on the impossibility of balancing these forces. He could not find a way to live fully within the contradictions he so eloquently wrote about; he chose instead a symbolic act that, in his mind, preserved a kind of eternal beauty.
Thus, when we read Mishima’s words, they carry the weight not only of philosophical musing but of lived experience. He knew the cost of trying to touch eternity while still trying to live a human life.
Conclusion
“For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.” This simple, devastating sentence reminds us that we cannot live authentically if we are constantly reaching for something that exists outside the bounds of time and change. To live fully is to embrace impermanence — to find beauty not in the frozen perfection of eternity but in the vibrant, imperfect, transient moments that define existence.
Mishima invites us to reconsider what we worship and to recognize the quiet courage it takes to love something even as it slips away. Life’s greatest gift is its transience. The secret is not to grasp for eternity but to immerse ourselves wholly in the fleeting wonder of now.
