Tbh, I disagree with many of the book's ideas, but still, humor has very strong therapeutic possibilities, and that is very interesting.

Humour is not a mood but a way of looking at the world

- Culture and Value, by Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Tradition, and our common confidence that there exist things that are truly good and evil, has been lost. “The longing for the beyond has been attenuated. The very models of admiration and contempt have vanished.” All of this has made us “narrower and flatter.” Americans are becoming self-centered relativists, unconcerned with finding permanent truths, but overly concerned with finding a “lifestyle” that suits them and constructing a “self” with which they can be comfortable. “It is nihilism with a happy ending.”¹

— Laughing at Nothing.
¹Allan Bloom, The Closing of The American Mind

The problem with words, though, is that they have a “corrosive function. Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words themselves will be corroded too.” Words, Mishima believes, originally functioned as a means of communication between people, linking humans together in the common experience of reality. Words may have a connection with the world, but they always also distance us from the world of the here-and-now to the extent that they abstract from particular circumstances in order to create readily recognizable generalizations. This is useful and healthy when it fosters connection between individuals and the further uncovering of reality, but too often, as in his own case, the abstraction of words snowballs, and the words themselves become more and more disconnected from their original sources until they possess no discernible connection to reality at all.

Because of the distance words create between people and the world, anyone who works solely with words cannot hope to perfectly apprehend truth or reality. The best that a novelist can strive for is to express an original, new, and idiosyncratic interpretation of the world. The bodybuilder, however, seeks to instantiate the universal and classical form of physical beauty that lies hidden in all humans. As an author, Mishima used words in a way that demonstrated his own unique view, his own experience, and his own interpretation of Being.
However, as a bodybuilder, he used weights in a way that demonstrated to him the form that lies latent in everyone. His individual will could have no say in the emergence of the various muscles that must make themselves known when exercised. In the “language of the body,” “The limiting factors, ultimately, are the harmony and balance on which the body insists. . . . They also, it seems, fulfill the function of taking revenge on, and correcting, any excessively eccentric idea.” As opposed to the “depth” of the artist, the bodybuilder concentrates on surfaces, remaining “shallow” yet scrupulously faithful to reality. It is just this shallowness, furthermore, that allows a bridge to be built between one individual and others. Whereas the artist accentuates the individual and eccentric, the bodybuilder accentuates the common and the shared shapes that all humans recognize and appreciate. Mishima’s participation in group exercises at the gym, at his military unit, and in carrying a shrine in the Summer Festival all attuned him to the direct, shared, physical connection of one human with another, bringing him into contact with “a joy akin to terror.”

He was also a cat lover:

My guy was dedicated to the gym;
He kept training 3 days a week since the age of 30 til his death at the age of 45

Clarice and her lamb
From 'The Silence of The Lambs'

العزلة صميمةٌ لا مَهربَ مِنها. ولا يمكن لأي علاقةٍ أنْ تنفي العزلة. غير أنّ الإنسان يمكن أنْ يشارك شخصًا آخر عزلته بطريقةٍ تخفّف شيئًا مِن ألم العزلة. فإذا سلّم الإنسانُ تسليمًا بوضعه الوجودي المعزول واحتمله بشجاعةٍ وعزم، عندئذٍ فقط يمكنه أنْ يتجه بحبٍ نحو الآخرين. أمّا إنْ تملّكه الرعب من مواجهة العزلة فلن يكون بمقدوره أنْ يتجه إلى الآخرين. كلّ ما يستطيع فعله آنذاك هو أنْ يستعمل الآخرين كدرعٍ تحميه من العزلة. في مثل هذه الحالة لن تكون العلاقات سوى إخفاقاتٍ مفَكَّكة وإجهاضات وصورٍ مشوَهة لما ينبغي أنْ تكون عليه العلاقات الأصيلة.

يحاول الكثيرون أنْ يتخلصوا من العزلة عن طريق الإنصهار أو الإلتحام fusion فَيُلينون حدود الذات ويصبحون جزءًا من فردٍ آخر. إنهم يتجنبون النمو الشخصي والإحساس بالعزلة الذي يصاحب النمو. هذا الإنصهار هو الذي يبطّن خبرة الحب. فالعجيب في أمر الحب الرومانسي هو أنّ «الأنا» المنعزلة تختفي في «النحن». وقد يندمج البعض بجماعةٍ أو بقضية أو وطن أو مشروع. أنْ تكون كأي فردٍ آخر؛ أنْ تمتثل وتخضع وتساير في الملبس والحديث والعادات، ألّا تكون لك أفكارٌ خاصة أو مشاعر مختلفة؛ كل ذلك من غايته ومُبتغاه أنْ يُنقذ الفرد من عزلته.

- مدخل إلى العلاج النفسي الوجودي، ترجمة د. عادل مصطفى

كلامه حول أنْ يذوّب الفرد ذاته بقضية أو جماعة ذكرني بشي قريته قبل كم يوم، جان manifesto مال وحدة من الحركات الثورية الروسية بالقرن الـ 19، من ضمن بنوده:

The revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no attachments, no belongings, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single exclusive interest, a single thought, a sin-gle passion—the revolution