Percival Lowell

“ Everybody got out and shuffled off on their clogs. The baskets, Yejiro, and I followed, after a little, through the gloaming.
It was not far to the inn. It was just far enough, at that hour, to put us in heart for a housing. Indeed, twilight is the time of times to arrive anywhere. Any spot, be it ever so homely, seems homelike then. The dusk has snatched from you the silent companionship of nature, to leave you poignantly alone. It is the hour when a man draws closer to the one he loves, and the hour when most he shrinks from himself, though he want another near. ”

“ If night discloses glimpses of the great beyond, knowledge invests it with a meaning unfolding and extending as acquaintance grows. Sight is human; insight seems divine. To know those points of light for other worlds themselves, worlds the telescope approaches as the years advance, while study reconstructs their past and visions forth their future, is to be made free of the heritage of heaven. Time opens to us as space expands. We stand upon the Earth, but in the sky, a vital portion not only of our globe, but of all of which it, too, forms part. To feel it is to enter upon another life ”

“ Nor is the stillness of the stars invaded when some long unearthly howl, like the wail of a lost soul, breaks the slumber of the mesa forest, marking the prowling presence of a stray coyote. Gone as it came, it dies in the distance on the air that gave it birth; and the gloom of the pines swallows up one’s vain peering after something palpable, their tops alone decipherable in dark silhouette against the sky. From amid surroundings that for their height and their intenancy fringe the absolute silence of space the observer must set forth who purposes to cross it to another planetary world. ”

“ Active once, it has been inactive now beyond the memory of man. Yet its form lets one divine what it must have been in its day. For upon its summit are the crumbling walls of eight successive craters, piled in parapet up into the sky.
It is not dead; it slumbers. For on its western face a single solfatara sends heavenward long, slender filaments of vapor, faint breath of what now sleeps beneath; a volcano sunk in trance.
Almost unknown to foreigners, it is well known to the Japanese. For it is perhaps the most sacred of Japan's many sacred peaks. ”

“ All at once he becomes conscious of himself; and the consciousness has about it a touch of the uncanny. Hitherto he has been aware only of matter; he now first realizes mind. Unwarned, unprepared, he is suddenly ushered before being, and stands awe-struck in the presence of—himself.
If the introduction to his own identity was startling, there is nothing reassuring in the feeling that this strange acquaintanceship must last. For continue it does. It becomes an unsought intimacy he cannot shake off. Like to his own shadow he cannot escape it. To himself a man cannot but be at home. ”

“ That we are the sum and substance of the capabilities of the cosmos is something so preposterous as to be exquisitely comic. We pride ourselves upon being men of the world, forgetting that this is but objectionable singularity, unless we are, in some wise, men of more worlds than one. For, after all, we are but a link in a chain. Man is merely this earth's highest production up to date. That he in any sense gauges the possibilities of the universe is humorous. He does not, as we can easily foresee, even gauge those of this planet. ”

“ Almost every house has its kami-dana or Shintō-god's shelf, a tiny household shrine, the glorification of some cupboard or recess. And there in the half-light stands the gohei again, there in the heart of each Japanese home.
It is no more confined to an indoor life than man himself. You shall meet it abroad all over the land, in the most unexpected nooks and corners. ”

“ We now began to enter the snow in good earnest, incipient glacier snow, treacherously honeycombed. It made, however, more agreeable walking than the boulders. The path had again become precipitous, and kept on mounting, till of a sudden it landed us upon an amphitheatral arena, dominated by high, jagged peaks. One unbroken stretch of snow covered the plateau, and at the centre of the wintry winding-sheet a cluster of weather-beaten huts appealed pitiably to the eye. They were the buildings of the Riuzanjita hot-springs; in summer a sort of secular monastery for pilgrims to the Dragon peak. ”

“ Lowell was in thought or word or deed; and very refreshing it is, like a cool breath of pure air in the artificial heat and closeness of a crowded room, to consider such a character in these days of blatant, forth-putting mediocrity. When to seem is at a premium, and to be at a discount, it is invigorating to turn to a life which owed nothing to adventitious or meritricious aid; a life which not only was fine, but escaped the soiling consequent upon too much mental fingering by the world at large. ”

“ Neither heart nor head is truly the man, for he is conscious of something that stands behind both. Behind desire, behind even the will, lies the soul, the same for all men, one with the soul of the universe. When he has once realized this eternal truth, the man has entered Nirvana. For Nirvana is not an absorption of the individual soul into the soul of all things, since the one has always been a part of the other. Still less is it utter annihilation. It is simply the recognition of the eternal oneness of the two, back through an everlasting past on through an everlasting future. ”

“ Lost in the brilliance of the dazzling sky, the planet lies hid from the senses’ search. The quest were hopeless did not the mind guide the telescope to its goal. To theory alone is it visible still, and so to its predicted place the observer sets his circles, and punctual to the prophecy the planet swings into the field of view. One must be dulled by long routine to such mastery of mind not to have the act itself clothe with a sense of charmed withdrawal the object of his quest. ”

“ A few short hours of shifting panorama, a varying foreground of valley that narrowed or widened like the flow of the stream that had made it, peaks that opened and shut on one another like the changing flies in some spectacular play, and we had compassed two days' worth of old-time travel when a man made every foot of ground his own, and were drawing near Zenkoji.
I was glad to be there; hardly as glad to be there so soon. There are lands made to be skimmed, tame samenesses of plain or weary wastes of desert, where even the iron horse gallops too slow. Japan is not one of them. ”

“ Only the edge next perpetual day has anything approaching an equal distribution of sunlight and shade. The farther one just peeps at the Sun for a moment every eighty-eight days, and then sinks back again into obscurity.
The transition from day to night is equally instantaneous and profound. For little or no twilight here prolongs the light; since the air, if there be any at all, is too thin to bend it to service round the edge to illuminate the night. When the libratory Sun sets, darkness like a mantle falls swiftly over the face of the ground. ”

“ From the contemplation of such works of art as we call finished, one is apt, after he has once appreciated Far Eastern taste, to rise with an unpleasant feeling of satiety, as if he has eaten too much at the feast.
Their paintings, by comparison, we call sketches. Is not our would-be slight unwittingly the reverse? Is not a sketch, after all, fuller of meaning, to one who knows how to read it, than a finished affair, which is very apt to end with itself, barren of fruit? Does not one's own imagination elude one's power to portray it? ”

“ For it is no less a palpable fact that ideas take time to develop into distinctness, and even more time to fade again into oblivion. Dissolving views upon our cortical screen, the last grows ghostly as the next takes shape, and lingers some seconds ere it vanishes quite. It is this corona of past, present, and nascent thought, limning the central idea of the moment that gives that idea its setting, and us our sense of self. ”

“ CLIMATE AND WEATHER In gazing at the successive phases presented by the polar caps as their annual history unrolls itself to view, beginning with vast white cloaks that in winter hide so effectively the planet’s shoulders, to little round knobs that in summer sit like guardsmen’s caps more or less askew upon the poles, the bodily eye sees only the glisten of far-off snow. The mind’s eye, however, perceives something more: the conviction they carry of the presence of an atmosphere surrounding the planet. ”

“ Darkness fell upon us while we were yet a long way from Ashikura, with an uncertain cliff path between us and it: for the path, like a true mountain trail, had the passion for climbing developed into a mania, and could never rest content with the river's bed whenever it spied a chance to rise. It had just managed an ascent up a zigzag stairway of its own invention, and had stepped out in the dark upon a patch of tall mountain grass, as dry as straw, when Yejiro conceived the brilliant idea of torches. ”

“ Future of the systemBut though we cannot as yet review with the mind's eye our past, we can, to an extent, foresee our future. We can with scientific confidence look forward to a time when each of the bodies composing the solar system shall turn an unchanging face in perpetuity to the Sun. Each will then have reached the end of its evolution, set in the unchanging stare of death.
Then the Sun itself will go out, becoming a cold and lifeless mass; and the solar system will circle unseen, ghostlike, in space, awaiting only the resurrection of another cosmic catastrophe. ”

“ It is not so much the slowness of the diurnal spin, eighty-eight times as long as our own, which is surprising, as the fact that this makes its day infinite in length. Two antipodal hemispheres divide the planet, the one of which frizzles under eternal sun, the other freezes amid everlasting night. The Sun does not, indeed, stand stock-still in the sky, but nods like some huge pendulum to and fro along a parallel of latitude. ”

“ Indeed, to a Far Oriental, so fundamental a part of himself is his love of Nature that before we view its mirrored image it will be well to look the emotion itself in the face. The Far Oriental lives in a long day-dream of beauty. He muses rather than reasons, and all musing, so the word itself confesses, springs from the inspiration of a Muse. But this Muse appears not to him, as to the Greeks, after the fashion of a woman, nor even more prosaically after the likeness of a man. Unnatural though it seem to us, his inspiration seeks no human symbol. His Muse is not kin to mankind. ”

“ From the plateau it rose proudly in one long sweep from moor to shoulder, from shoulder to crag, from crag to snow, up into the leaden sky, high into its second mile of air. Subtly the curve carried fancy with it, and I found myself in mind slowly picking my way upward, threading an arete here and scaling a slope there, with all the feelings of a genuine climb. While I was still ascending in this insubstantial manner, clouds fell upon the summit from the sky, and from the summit tumbled down the ravines into the valley, and met me at Naoyetsu in a drizzling rain. ”

“ Seen itself, no longer imperfectly seen through, it wakes to semi-sentient existence, a spirit come to life aloft to shield us from the too immediate vacancy of space. The perfumes of the soil, the trees, the flowers, steal out to it, as the twilight glow itself exhales to heaven. In the hushed quiet of the gloaming Earth holds her breath, prescient of a revelation to come. ”

“ Manikin maples, Tom Thumb trees, a foot high and thirty years old, with all the gnarls and knots and knuckles of their fellows of the forest, grow in his parterres, their native vitality not a whit diminished. And they are not regarded as monstrosities but only as the most natural of artificialities; for they are a part of a horticultural whole. To walk into a Japanese garden is like wandering of a sudden into one of those strange worlds we see reflected in the polished surface of a concave mirror, where all but the observer himself is transformed into a fantastic miniature of the reality. ”

“ A deserted one should be the place of places for reading a romance. The solitude, the strangeness, and the cradle-like swing, would all compose to shutting out the world. To paddle there some May morning, tie one's boat out of sight beneath, and climb up into the nest to sit alone half poised in the sky in the midst of the sea, should savor of a new sensation. After a little acclimatization it would probably become a passion. Certainly, with a pipe, it should induce a most happy frame of mind for a French novel. The seeming risk of the one situation would serve to point those of the other. ”

“ In color the planet is ghastly white; of that wan hue that suggests a body from which all life has fled. Far whiter than Venus in point of fact, the rosy tint with which it sparkles in the sunset glow is all borrowed of the dying day and vanishes when the planet is looked at in the uncompromising light of noon. Seen close together once at Flagstaff it was possible directly to compare the two; when Mercury, although lit by the Sun two and a half times as brilliantly as Venus, was, surface for surface, more than twice as faint. ”

“ In its lofty superiority to man, science is unpersonal rather than impersonal. Art, on the other hand, is a familiar spirit. Through the windows of the senses she finds her way into the very soul of man, and makes for herself a home there. But it is to his humanity, not to his individuality, that she whispers, for she speaks in that universal tongue which all can understand.
Examples are not wanting to substantiate theory. It is no mere coincidence that the two most impersonal nations of Europe and Asia respectively, the French and the Japanese, are at the same time the most artistic. ”

“ While we were strolling back, Yejiro and I, we came, in the way, upon another species of fish. The bait, which was well designed to captivate, bade for the moment to exceed even the angler's anticipations. It was a sort of un-Christmas tree with fishing-pole branches, from which dangled articulated figures, bodied like men, but with heads of foxes, tortoises, and other less likelybeasts, —bewitching objects in impossible evolution to a bald-pated urchin who stood gazing at it with all his soul. ”

“ To call a Japanese cook, for instance, an artist would be but the barest acknowledgment of fact, for Japanese food is far more beautiful to look at than agreeable to eat; while Tokio tailors are certainly masters of drapery, if they are sublimely oblivious to the natural modelings of the male or female form.
On the other hand, art is sown, like the use of tobacco, broadcast among the people. It is the birthright of the Far East, the talent it never hides. Throughout the length and breadth of the land, and from the highest prince to the humblest peasant, art reigns supreme. ”

“ To think that this fair globe with all it has brought forth must lapse in time to nothingness; that the generations of men shall cease to be, their very records obliterated, is something to strike a chill into the heart of the most callous and numb endeavor at its core. That æons must roll away before that final day is to the mind of the far-seeing no consolation for the end. Not only that we shall pass, but that everything to show we ever were shall perish too, seems an extinction too overpowering for words.
But vain regret avails not to change the universe's course. ”

“ No one who has not, after a long day's tramp, sought in vain to rest his weary body propped up against a side beam in a Japanese inn can enter into the feeling a chair inspires, even long afterward, by recollection.
I cannot say I loved Takasaki in former days. Was it my reception or was it sentiment that made me see it all now through a mist of glamour? Unsuspected by us, that atmosphere of time tints everything. Few things but look lovelier seen down the vista of the years. Indeed, sentiment is a kind of religion ”