A man sometimes devotes his life to a desire which he is not sure will ever be fulfilled. Those who laugh at this folly are, after all, no more than mere spectators of life.
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashomon and Other Stories

Le petit soldat, 1963.

Aaron Duval

White guard soldiers at Joensuu People’s House during the Finnish Civil War, spring 1918.

The longer you look at the monkey, the sooner you realize that you are the monkey.

Generation War

My understanding of happiness was completely different from how other people saw it, and it started bothering me. I couldn't sleep at night, it drove me crazy. So how did I feel? Was I happy or not?
— Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

DUKWs in the Venice canals, 1945.

The Diaries of Franz Kafka

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, The Gardens of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli, 1843
VS
Peter Turnley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin, Germany, 1989

Nakazora, #1228 (1999), Masao Yamamoto

“As can be easily imagined, a youth like myself came to entertain two opposing forms of power wishes. In history I enjoyed the descriptions of tyrants. I saw myself as a stuttering, taciturn tyrant; my retainers would hang on every expression that passed over my face and would live both day and night in fear and trembling of me. There is no need to justify my cruelty in clear, smooth words. My taciturnity alone was sufficient to justify every manner of cruelty.”
—

The stuttering Zen acolyte Mizoguchi, in the 1956 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Y. M.)

The heartland of cannabis in Kazakstan is the Chuy Valley that lies Kazakstan; it is estimated that up to 400,000 hectares of (mostly wild) cannabis grows there, accounting for around one-third of the available fertile soil and over 10% of the total area of the valley—possibly the largest cannabis fields in the world.

Martini commercial, 88/89.