I recently finished reading a novel by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow.  Spring Snow is the story of a young man born into a fairly low social station who craves the affection of a beautiful woman of a much higher level in society.  By a twist of fate and circumstance, the young man has frequent opportunity to interact with this lovely young woman, heightening his expectation and fervor.  He finds himself falling in love with her--but he is highly hesitant to tell her.  What will she say?
     As the story draws to a conclusion, the young man does tell her.  With this, the spell is broken.  She rejects and shuns him, and he retreats to a place deeply within himself, never to return.  His life is over, his time spent.  He has nothing more to do, nothing more to think about.  Love has proved a fraud, romance a myth.  It's a tragic tale of obsession on the scale of The French Lieutenant's Woman or Lolita, a tale that can never turn out well. Once made vulnerable and dismissed, love often never returns.  Obsessions only rarely result in personal peace:  life is a race for nothing.
     Compounding the angst of this story is the story of Mishima himself.  A fervent advocate of extreme right wing politics in Japan, when Mishima was not writing he was busy involved in various radical nationalist activities against the government.  He seemed obsessed.  Unfortunately, as the characters in Spring Snow crater into emotional or social holes, so does Mishima fall into the pit of his own obsession.  In 1970, he committed sepuka suicide, slashing open his stomach and dying, seemingly twice, as he passed from the planet.
     So we wonder how this happens, how people come to this, how the world breeds this type of response to it.  Humanity is so unpredictable.  We all long for things, be they emotional or physical or material, and most of us desire, in some form, existence.  Only when desire and longing prove futile do we reject them. Tragically, however, in rejecting them we reject purpose as well.  Yet purpose is the only reason we exist.  And purpose is only purpose because we say that it is.  But absent an explanation for existence, how do we really know?