Laurence Van Der Post著 「The seed and the sower」Vintage classics刊 p．17より抜粋

For this was the hour at which the Japanese usually came for him; this was the time of night when they usually did their torturing.

Yes, the details of it were not importnat, he said, but for weeks they had been torturing him, and the interesting thing was they did it always at night.

I might smile and think him fanciful as I did about his belief that Hara was an embodiment of a myth more than a conscious individual being, even through I had seen for myself how moon-swung Hara and his countrymen were.

But that was by no means all there was to it. That was only the elementary beginning of it all. The more complete truth was: they were all still deeply submerged like animals, insects and plants in the succession of the hours, the movement of day into night and of the days into their lunar months and the months into their seasons.

They were subject to cosmic rhythm and movement and ruled by cosmic forces beyond their control to an extent undreamt of in the European mind and philosophy.

He would have more to say of that presently, but all he had to stress at the moment was this: it was only at night that people so submerged in the raw elements of nature could discover sufficiently the night within themselves－could go down far enough with sun and sunlight into that bottom of their own unlit natures, where torture was not only natural but inevitable, like the tides of the sea.