do my best to prevent any spark of human feeling from springing up between us. Thus, however animatedly they may move hither and yon, they won’t find it easy to make the leap across to my heart; I will stand watching as before a picture, as they rush about inside it waving their arms. I can gaze with a calm and unflinching eye from the safe distance of three feet back. To express it another way: being free of self-interested motives, I will be able to devote all my energy to observing their actions from the point of view of Art. With no other thought in mind, I will be in a fine position to pass lofty judgment on the presence or absence of beauty in all I view. . . .
Just as I reach this conclusion, the sky grows suddenly ominous. The seething cloud that a little earlier began to loom overhead has quickly fractured and spread till all around me seems nothing but a sea of cloud, and now a gentle spring rain begins to fall. I have long since left the mustard blossom fields behind and am now high among mountains, but how close they are I cannot tell, owing to the veil of fine, almost mistlike rain. When a gust of wind from time to time parts the high clouds, I catch glimpses of the blackish shape of a high ridge off to my right. It seems that just across the valley from me runs a mountain range. Immediately to my right is the foot of another mountain. An occasional pine or some such tree appears suddenly from deep within the dense misty rain; no sooner is it there than it is gone again. Weirdly, I find myself unable to distinguish whether the rain is shifting, or the tree, or my own dreamy vision.
The path has grown surprisingly broad and flat, and I have no difficulty in walking now, but my lack of rain gear makes me hurry on my way. The rain is dripping from my hat when I hear, about ten yards ahead, the tinkle of a little bell, and out of the rainy darkness emerges a packhorse driver.
“Would there be anywhere to rest around here?” I ask.
“There’s a teahouse a mile on. You’re pretty wet, aren’t you?”
Still a mile to go, I think, as the driver’s figure envelops itself in rain like some shadowy magic lantern form and becomes lost to sight once more.
I watch as the fine-grained rain gradually thickens to long continuous threads, each twisted by the wind. My haori has long since become saturated, 7 and the water has now penetrated my underwear, where it grows tepid from the heat of my body. It’s an unpleasant sensation, and I tilt my hat low and step briskly out.
If I picture myself, a sodden figure moving in this vast ink-wash world of cloud and rain shot through diagonally with a thousand silver arrows, not as myself but as some other person, there’s poetry in this moment. When I relinquish all thought of the self as is and cultivate the gaze of pure objectivity, then for the first time, as a figure in a painting, I attain a beautiful harmony with the natural phenomena around me. The instant I revert to thoughts of my distress at the falling rain and the weariness of my legs, I lose my place in the world of the poem or painting. I am as before, a mere callow townsman. The swirling brushstrokes of cloud and mist are a closed book to me; no poetic sentiment of falling blossom or calling bird stirs my breast; I have no way of understanding the beauty of my own self as it moves lonely as cloud and rain among the spring mountains. . . .
To begin with, I tilt my hat and stride out. Later, I simply walk with eyes fixed on my feet. In the end, I am plodding unsteadily along, with shoulders hunched. The branches filling my vision sway in the blowing rain, which drives in relentlessly from every direction upon the solitary traveler. This is a bit too much of the unhuman for my taste!
CHAPTER 2
“Anyone there?” I call. There is no response.
Standing beneath the eaves, I peer in. The smoke-stained paper screen doors beyond the entrance area are firmly shut, and what lies within is invisible. Half a dozen
Just as I reach this conclusion, the sky grows suddenly ominous. The seething cloud that a little earlier began to loom overhead has quickly fractured and spread till all around me seems nothing but a sea of cloud, and now a gentle spring rain begins to fall. I have long since left the mustard blossom fields behind and am now high among mountains, but how close they are I cannot tell, owing to the veil of fine, almost mistlike rain. When a gust of wind from time to time parts the high clouds, I catch glimpses of the blackish shape of a high ridge off to my right. It seems that just across the valley from me runs a mountain range. Immediately to my right is the foot of another mountain. An occasional pine or some such tree appears suddenly from deep within the dense misty rain; no sooner is it there than it is gone again. Weirdly, I find myself unable to distinguish whether the rain is shifting, or the tree, or my own dreamy vision.
The path has grown surprisingly broad and flat, and I have no difficulty in walking now, but my lack of rain gear makes me hurry on my way. The rain is dripping from my hat when I hear, about ten yards ahead, the tinkle of a little bell, and out of the rainy darkness emerges a packhorse driver.
“Would there be anywhere to rest around here?” I ask.
“There’s a teahouse a mile on. You’re pretty wet, aren’t you?”
Still a mile to go, I think, as the driver’s figure envelops itself in rain like some shadowy magic lantern form and becomes lost to sight once more.
I watch as the fine-grained rain gradually thickens to long continuous threads, each twisted by the wind. My haori has long since become saturated, 7 and the water has now penetrated my underwear, where it grows tepid from the heat of my body. It’s an unpleasant sensation, and I tilt my hat low and step briskly out.
If I picture myself, a sodden figure moving in this vast ink-wash world of cloud and rain shot through diagonally with a thousand silver arrows, not as myself but as some other person, there’s poetry in this moment. When I relinquish all thought of the self as is and cultivate the gaze of pure objectivity, then for the first time, as a figure in a painting, I attain a beautiful harmony with the natural phenomena around me. The instant I revert to thoughts of my distress at the falling rain and the weariness of my legs, I lose my place in the world of the poem or painting. I am as before, a mere callow townsman. The swirling brushstrokes of cloud and mist are a closed book to me; no poetic sentiment of falling blossom or calling bird stirs my breast; I have no way of understanding the beauty of my own self as it moves lonely as cloud and rain among the spring mountains. . . .
To begin with, I tilt my hat and stride out. Later, I simply walk with eyes fixed on my feet. In the end, I am plodding unsteadily along, with shoulders hunched. The branches filling my vision sway in the blowing rain, which drives in relentlessly from every direction upon the solitary traveler. This is a bit too much of the unhuman for my taste!
CHAPTER 2
“Anyone there?” I call. There is no response.
Standing beneath the eaves, I peer in. The smoke-stained paper screen doors beyond the entrance area are firmly shut, and what lies within is invisible. Half a dozen
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