Lafcadio Hearn

“ So light and sweet was the playing that Itō could scarcely believe the evidence of his senses. A slumbrous feeling of delight stole over him as he listened,—a delight strangely mingled with sadness. He wondered how any woman could have learned to play thus,—wondered whether the player could be a woman,—wondered even whether he was hearing earthly music; for enchantment seemed to have entered into his blood with the sound of it.
The soft music ceased; and almost at the same moment Itō found the little miya-dzukai beside him. "Sir," she said, "it is requested that you will honorably enter." ”

“ Various beings in Japanese myth are credited with power to delude mortals by creating a mirage of Hōrai. In old pictures one may see a toad represented in the act of exhaling from its mouth a vapor that shapes the apparition of Hōrai.
But the creature especially wont to produce this illusion is the Hamaguri,—a Japanese mollusk much resembling a clam. Opening its shell, it sends into the air a purplish misty breath; and that mist takes form and defines, in tints of mother-of-pearl, the luminous vision of Hōrai and the palace of the Dragon-King. ”

“ The greatest mind that this world has yet produced—the mind that systematized all human knowledge, that revolutionized modern science, that dissipated materialism forever, that revealed to us the ghostly unity of all existence, that reestablished all ethics upon an immutable and eternal foundation,—the mind that could expound with equal lucidity, and by the same universal formula, the history of a gnat or the history of a sun—confessed itself, before the Riddle of Existence, scarcely less helpless than the mind of a child. ”

“ For the thought of personal perpetuity in the infinite vortex is enough to evoke sudden trepidations that no tongue can utter,—fugitive instants of a horror too vast to enter wholly into consciousness: a horror that can be endured in swift black glimpsings only. And the trust that we are one with the Absolute—dim points of thrilling in the abyss of It—can prove a consoling faith only to those who find themselves obliged to think that consciousness dissolves with the crumbling of the brain.... ”

“ Who weds a ghost must become a ghost;—yet he knew himself ready to die, not once, but many times, rather than betray by word or look one thought that might bring a shadow of pain to the brow of the beautiful illusion before him. ”

“ Space, as forced upon us by those monstrous facts of astronomy which require no serious study to apprehend, is terrifying;—I mean the mere vague idea of that everlasting Night into which the blazing of millions of suns can bring neither light nor warmth. But to the intellect of Herbert Spencer the idea of Space must have presented itself after a manner incomparably more mysterious and stupendous. ”

“ This year, however, a majority of the displays represented scenes of the war,—such as an engagement between Japanese infantry and mounted Cossacks, a night attack by torpedo boats, the sinking of a battleship. In the last-mentioned display, Russian bluejackets appeared, swimming for their lives in a rough sea;—the pasteboard waves and the swimming figures being made to rise and fall by the pulling of a string; while the crackling of quick-firing guns was imitated by a mechanism contrived with sheets of zinc. ”

“ Matsumura sent at an early hour for well-cleaners to search the well. Then, to everybody's surprise, the well proved to be almost dry. It was easily cleaned; and at the bottom of it were found some hair-ornaments of a very ancient fashion, and a metal mirror of curious form—but no trace of any body, animal or human.
Matusmura imagined, however, that the mirror might yield some explanation of the mystery; for every such mirror is a weird thing, having a soul of its own,—and the soul of a mirror is feminine. This mirror, which seemed to be very old, was deeply crusted with scurf. ”

“ The whole meaning of the poem is as follows: "See that young wanton with her lantern! It is a pretty sight—but so is the sight of a fox, when the creature kindles his goblin-fire and assumes the shape of a girl. And just as your fox-woman will prove to be no more than an old horse-bone, so that young courtesan, whose beauty deludes men to folly, may be nothing better than an Éta." ”

“ But it seems a strange and repugnant conclusion that with the cessation of consciousness at death there ceases to be any knowledge of having existed. With his last breath it becomes to each the same thing as though he had never lived. ”

“ The life of Tōkyō has been, to outward seeming, hardly more affected by the events of the war than the life of nature beyond it, where the flowers are blooming and the butterflies hovering as in other summers. ”

“ One summer night, Hakuyō—now immortally beautiful and young—descended from heaven upon her magpie, to visit her husband; and he was made very happy by that visit. But from that time he could think of nothing but the bliss of becoming a star, and joining Hakuyō beyond the River of Heaven. At last he also ascended to the sky, riding upon a crow; and there he became a star-god. But he could not join Hakuyō at once, as he had hoped;—for between his allotted place and hers flowed the River of Heaven ”

“ For this Inscrutable that pulses through substance as if substance were not at all,—so subtly that none can feel the flowing of its tides, yet so swiftly that no life-time would suffice to count the number of the oscillations which it makes within the fraction of one second,—thrills to us out of endlessness;—and the force of infinity dwells in its lightest tremor; the weight of eternity presses behind its faintest shudder. ”

“ In the realization of his ideal Hearn took unremitting pains. He gave a minute and analytical study to the writings of such masters of style as Flaubert and Gautier, and he chose his miscellaneous reading with a peculiar care. He wrote again to the same friend: "I never read a book which does not powerfully impress the imagination; but whatever contains novel, curious, potent imagery I always read, no matter what the subject. When the soil of fancy is really well enriched with innumerable fallen leaves, the flowers of language grow spontaneously." ”

“ Though assured that we have yet no foundation for any belief in the persistence of consciousness after the death of the brain, we are bidden to remember that the ultimate nature of consciousness remains inscrutable. Though we cannot surmise the relation of consciousness to the unseen, we are reminded that it must be considered as a manifestation of the Infinite Energy, and that its elements, if dissociated by death, will return to the timeless and measureless Source of Life.... ”

“ Gunshin Hirosé Chūsa. The character "gun" signifies war; the character "shin" a god,—either in the sense of divus or deus, according to circumstances; and the Chinese text, read in the Japanese way, is Ikusa no Kami. Whether that stern and valiant spirit is really invoked by the millions who believe that no brave soul is doomed to extinction, no well-spent life laid down in vain, no heroism cast away, I do not know. But, in any event, human affection and gratitude can go no farther than this; and it must be confessed that Old Japan is still able to confer honors worth dying for. ”

“ Here, in this quiet suburb, where the green peace is broken only by the voices of children at play and the shrilling of cicadæ, it is difficult to imagine that, a few hundred miles away, there is being carried on one of the most tremendous wars of modern times, between armies aggregating more than half a million of men, or that, on the intervening sea, a hundred ships of war have been battling. ”

“ A Sakasa-bashira knew how to make all the affairs of a household go wrong,—how to foment domestic quarrels,—how to contrive misfortune for each of the family and the servants,—how to render existence almost insupportable until such time as the carpenter's blunder should be discovered and remedied. ”

“ Science to-day also assures us that whatever existence has been—all individual life that ever moved in animal or plant,—all feeling and thought that ever stirred in human consciousness—must have flashed self-record beyond the sphere of sentiency; and though we cannot know, we cannot help imagining that the best of such registration may be destined to perpetuity. ”

“ To ancient Chinese fancy, the Milky Way was a luminous river,—the River of Heaven,—the Silver Stream. It has been stated by Western writers that Tanabata, the Weaving-Lady, is a star in Lyra; and the Herdsman, her beloved, a star in Aquila, on the opposite side of the galaxy. But it were more correct to say that both are represented, to Far-Eastern imagination, by groups of stars. An old Japanese book puts the matter thus plainly: "Kengyū (the Ox-Leader) is on the west side of the Heavenly River, and is represented by three stars in a row, and looks like a man leading an ox. ”

“ After studying primitive beliefs, and finding that there is no origin for the idea of an after-life, save the conclusion which the savage draws, from the notion suggested by dreams, of a wandering double which comes back on awaking, and which goes away for an indefinite time at death;—and after contemplating the inscrutable relation between brain and consciousness, and finding that we can get no evidence of the existence of the last without the activity of the first,—we seem obliged to relinquish the thought that consciousness continues after physical organization has become inactive. ”

“ To that phantom-Touch, the tinting of a blossom or the dissipation of a universe were equally facile: here it caresses the eye with the charm and illusion of color; there it bestirs into being a cluster of giant suns. All that human mind is capable of conceiving as possible (and how much [pg 121] also that human mind must forever remain incapable of conceiving?) ”

“ Japan has boldly challenged an empire capable of threatening simultaneously the civilizations of the East and the West,—a mediæval power that, unless vigorously checked, seems destined to absorb Scandinavia and to dominate China. For all industrial civilization the contest is one of vast moment;—for Japan it is probably the supreme crisis in her national life. As to what her fleets and her armies have been doing, the world is fully informed ”

“ There is a story that, many ages ago, a beautiful woman visited the dwelling of a farmer in the mountains of Izumo, and taught to the only daughter of the household an art of weaving never before known. One evening the beautiful stranger vanished away; and the people knew that they had seen the Weaving-Lady of Heaven. The daughter of the farmer [pg 12] became renowned for her skill in weaving. But she would never marry,—because she had been the companion of Tanabata-Sama.
Then there is a Chinese story—delightfully vague—about a man who once made a visit, unawares, to the Heavenly Land. ”

“ We feel without understanding feeling; and our most powerful emotions are the most undefinable. This must be so, because they are inherited accumulations of feeling, and the multiplicity of them—superimposed one over another—blurs them, and makes them dim, even though enormously increasing their strength.... Unconscious brain work is the best to develop such latent feeling or thought. By quietly writing the thing over and over again, I find that the emotion or idea often develops itself in the process,—unconsciously. ”

“ An almost literal rendering would be "ghost-sickness." In Japanese-English dictionaries you will find the meaning of Rikombyō given as "hypochondria;" and doctors really use the term in this modern sense. But the ancient meaning was a disorder of the mind which produced a Double; and there is a whole strange literature about this weird disease. It used to be supposed, both in China and Japan, that under the influence of intense grief or longing, caused by love, the spirit of the suffering person would create a Double. Thus the victim of Rikombyō would appear to have two bodies, exactly alike ”

“ The enormity of the problem of existence becomes manifest only to those who have permitted themselves to think freely and widely and deeply, with all such aids to thought as exact science can furnish; and the larger the knowledge of the thinker, the more pressing and tremendous the problem appears, and [pg 109] the more hopelessly unanswerable. To Herbert Spencer himself it must have assumed a vastness beyond the apprehension of the average mind ”

“ During the last twenty years there has gradually come into existence the custom of placing the photograph of a dead parent, brother, husband, or child, beside the mortuary tablet kept in the Buddhist household shrine. For this reason, also, the departing soldier wishes to leave at home a good likeness of himself.
The rites of domestic affection, in old samurai families, are not confined to the cult of the dead. On certain occasions, the picture of the absent parent, husband, brother, or betrothed, is placed in the alcove of the guest-room, and a feast laid out before it. ”