Lafcadio Hearn

“ One are we all, even as Light is, though unspeakable the millions of the vibrations whereby it is made. One are we all,—and yet many, because each is a world of ghosts. Surely that girl saw and spoke to her mother's very soul, while seeing the fair shadow of her own young eyes and lips, uttering love!
And, with this thought, the strange display in the old temple court takes a new meaning,—becomes the symbolism of a sublime expectation. Each of us is truly a mirror, imaging something of the universe,—reflecting also the reflection of ourselves in that universe ”

“ And not beauty alone, of sight or sound, but well-nigh all that is mystic, sublime, or holy, now makes appeal to us through some marvelously woven intricate plexus of passional sensibility. Even the subtlest forces of our universe speak to us of woman; new sciences have taught us new names for the thrill her presence wakens in the blood, for that ghostly shock which is first love, for the eternal riddle of her fascination. Thus, out of simple human passion, through influences and transformations innumerable, we have evolved a cosmic emotion, a feminine pantheism. ”

“ Who is really able to assure us that secret evil desires, pent-up resentments, masked hates, do not exert any force outside of the will that conceives and nurses them? May there not be a deeper meaning than Western ethics recognize in those words of the Buddha,—"Hatred ceases not by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love: this is an old rule"? It was very old then, even in his day. In ours it has been said, "Whensoever a wrong is done you, and you do not resent it, then so much evil dies in the world." ”

“ But after each tremendous integration the flaming spheres cool down and ripen into life; and the life ripens into Thought. The ghost in each one of us must have passed through the burning of a million suns,—must survive the awful vanishing of countless future universes. May not Memory somehow and somewhere also survive? Are we sure that in ways and forms unknowable it does not? as infinite vision,—remembrance of the Future in the Past? Perhaps in the Night-without-end, as in deeps of Nirvana, dreams of all that has ever been, of all that can ever be, are being perpetually dreamed. ”

“ All that you see to suggest it will be refined, courteous, exquisite, but of the relation of those souls to each other you will know nothing. Behind the beautiful screens which mask the further interior, all is silent, gentle mystery. There is no reason, to the Japanese mind, why it should be otherwise. Such family life is sacred; the home is a sanctuary, of which it were impious to draw aside the veil. Nor can I think this idea of the sacredness of home and of the family relation in any wise inferior to our highest conception of the home and the family in the West. ”

“ Man's evolution is a progress into perfection and beatitude. The goal of evolution is Equilibration. Evils will vanish, one by one, till only that which is good survive. Then shall knowledge obtain its uttermost expansion; then shall mind put forth its most wondrous blossoms; then shall cease all struggle and all bitterness of soul, and all the wrongs and all the follies of life. Men shall become as gods, in all save immortality; and each existence shall be prolonged through centuries; and all the joys of life shall be made common in many a paradise terrestrial, fairer than poet's dream. ”

“ Out of the sum of his toil are wrought the ships of iron, the roads of steel, the palaces of stone; his are the hands that pay for the universities and the new learning, for the telegraphs and the electric lights and the repeating-rifles, for the machinery of science and the machinery of commerce and the machinery of war. He is the giver of all; he is given in return—the right to labor forever. Wherefore he plows the centuries under, to plant new lives of men. And he will thus toil on till the work of the world shall have been done,—till the time of the end of man. ”

“ Life—life as unity, uncreated, without beginning,—of which we know the luminous shadows only;—life forever striving against death, and always conquered yet always surviving—what is it?—why is it? A myriad times the universe is dissipated,—a myriad times again evolved; and the same life vanishes with every vanishing, only to reappear in another cycling. The Cosmos becomes a nebula, the nebula a Cosmos: eternally the swarms of suns and worlds are born ”

“ I saw the Daughter of the Dragon King waiting vainly in the palace made beautiful for his welcome,—and the pitiless return of the Cloud, announcing what had happened,—and the loving uncouth sea-creatures, in their garments of great ceremony, trying to comfort her. But in the real story there was nothing of all this; and the pity of the people seemed to be all for Urashima. And I began to discourse with myself thus:—
Is it right to pity Urashima at all? Of course he was bewildered by the gods. But who is not bewildered by the gods? What is Life itself but a bewilderment? ”

“ Even as out of the Unknown was born the immeasurable pain of the Past, so into the Unknown must expire the immeasurable pain of the Future. What, therefore, the worth of our evolution? what, therefore, the meaning of life—of this phantom-flash between darknesses? Is your evolution only a passing out of absolute mystery into universal death? In the hour when that man in the hat of straw shall have crumbled back, for the last mundane time, into the clay he tills, of what avail shall have been all the labor of a million years? ”

“ At the Shintō temple of Fujisaki sacred charms were being distributed to the men. But the most imposing rites were those at Honmyōji, the far-famed monastery of the Nichiren sect, where for three hundred years have reposed the ashes of Kato Kiyomasa, conqueror of Korea, enemy of the Jesuits, protector of the Buddhists;—Honmyōji, where the pilgrim chant of the sacred invocation, Namu-myō-hō-renge-kyō, sounds like the roar of surf;—Honmyōji, where you may buy wonderful little mamori in the shape of tiny Buddhist shrines, each holding a minuscule image of the deified warrior. ”

“ Whatsoever delights us imagination has feminized,—the infinite tenderness of the sky,—the mobility of waters,—the rose of dawn,—the vast caress of Day,—Night, and the lights of heaven,—even the undulations of the eternal hills. And flowers, and the flush of fruit, and all things fragrant, fair, and gracious; the genial seasons with their voices; the laughter of streams, and whisper of leaves, and ripplings of song within the shadows;—all sights, or sounds, or sensations that can touch our love of loveliness, of delicacy, of sweetness, of gentleness, make for us vague dreams of woman. ”

“ I thought of the pictures and poems and proverbs recording the influence of the legend upon the imagination of a race. I thought of an Izumo dancing-girl I saw at a banquet acting the part of Urashima, with a little lacquered box whence there issued at the tragical minute a mist of Kyōto incense. I thought about the antiquity of the beautiful dance,—and therefore about vanished generations of dancing-girls,—and therefore about dust in the abstract; which, again, led me to think of dust in the concrete, as bestirred by the sandals of the kurumaya to whom I was to pay only seventy-five sen. ”

“ Death is not death, not a rest, not an end of pain, but the most appalling of mockeries. And out of this infinite whirl of pain you can tell us no way of escape. Have you then made us any wiser than that straw-sandaled peasant is? He knows all this. He learned, while yet a child, from the priests who taught him to write in the Buddhist temple school, something of his own innumerable births, and of the apparition and disparition of universes, and of the unity of life. That which you have mathematically discovered was known to the East long before the coming of the Buddha. ”

“ And one, perhaps, is with her: he who makes the grave seem fairer than the palace to those who fear not; he whom the people call Shinigami, the lord of death-desire. For her the future holds no blackness. Always she will see the rising of the holy Sun above the peaks, the smile of the Lady-Moon upon the waters, the eternal magic of the Seasons. She will haunt the places of beauty, beyond the folding of the mists, in the sleep of the cedar-shadows, through circling of innumerable years. ”

“ Just beyond the cemetery, in a tiny patch of hedged-in land, a farmer and his ox are plowing the black soil with a plow of the Period of the Gods; and the wife helps the work with a hoe more ancient than even the Empire of Japan. All the three are toiling with a strange earnestness, as though goaded without mercy by the knowledge that labor is the price of life. ”

“ Tarō sobbed and snuffled helplessly for a moment, before he could answer: "I am very unhappy here. I want to go home."
"Why?" questioned the girl, slipping an arm about his neck.
"They all hate me; they will not speak to me or play with me."
"Oh no!" said the girl. "Nobody dislikes you at all. It is only because you are a stranger. When I first went to school, last year, it was just the same with me. You must not fret."
"But all the others are playing; and I must sit in here," protested Tarō. ”

“ To understand what I mean by the ability of the Japanese artist, my reader must imagine just such a power of almost instantaneous creation as that which characterizes certain French work, applied to almost every subject except individuality, to nearly all recognized general types, to all aspects of Japanese nature, to all forms of native landscape, to clouds and flowing water and mists, to all the life of woods and fields, to all the moods of seasons and the tones of horizons and the colors of the morning and the evening. ”

“ For she gave up her children and everything,—even like the Buddha [Shaka] himself. Yet she was very young. How true and brave! The beauty of her face might perish like a spring-blossoming, but the beauty of her act should be remembered for a thousand times a thousand years. Eternally her soul will hover in the universe. Formless she is now; but it is the Formless who teach us more kindly than our kindest living teachers,—the souls of all who have done pure, brave, wise deeds."
"The wife of Admetus," said Kumamoto, inclined to austerity in his judgments, "was simply obedient. ”

“ Now, the reserve of Japanese literature regarding that love which is the great theme of our greatest novelists and poets is exactly paralleled by the reserve of Japanese society in regard to the same topic. The typical woman often figures in Japanese romance as a heroine; as a perfect mother; as a pious daughter, willing to sacrifice all for duty; as a loyal wife, who follows her husband into battle, fights by his side, saves his life at the cost of her own; never as a sentimental maiden, dying, or making others die, for love. ”

“ For Japanese metal mirrors (now being superseded by atrocious cheap looking-glasses of Western manufacture) well deserve to be called things of beauty. Nobody unfamiliar with their gracious shapes can feel the charm of the Oriental comparison of the moon to a mirror. One side only is polished. The other is adorned with designs in relief: trees or flowers, birds or animals or insects, landscapes, legends, symbols of good fortune, figures of gods. Such are even the commonest mirrors. ”

“ Surely the smiles of bride and babe and mother have been reflected in not a few: some gentle home life must have been imaged in nearly all. But a ghostlier value than memory can give also attaches to Japanese mirrors. An ancient proverb declares, "The Mirror is the Sold of the Woman,"—and not merely, as might be supposed, in a figurative sense. For countless legends relate that a mirror feels all the joys or pains of its mistress, and reveals in its dimness or brightness some weird sympathy with her every emotion. ”

“ Each figure flung from the Oriental painter's brush is a lesson, a revelation, to perceptions unbeclouded by prejudice, an opening of the eyes of those who can see, though it be only a spider in a wind-shaken web, a dragon-fly riding a sunbeam, a pair of crabs running through sedge, the trembling of a fish's fins in a clear current, the lilt of a flying wasp, the pitch of a flying duck, a mantis in fighting position, or a semi toddling up a cedar branch to sing. All this art is alive, intensely alive, and our corresponding art looks absolutely dead beside it. ”

“ The principle he followed was opposed not only to all society, but was contrary to all religion, and contrary to the morals of all countries."
"The story is certainly immoral," said Orito. "What it relates is opposed to all our ideas of love and loyalty, and even seems to us contrary to nature. Loyalty is not a mere duty. It must be from the heart, or it is not loyally. It must be an inborn feeling. And it is in the nature of every Japanese."
"It is a horrible story," said Andō. "Philanthropy itself is only an expansion of fraternal love. ”