The Socrates Express
- Автор: Вейнер Эрик
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
- Жанр: География, путевые заметки
Электронная книга - «The Socrates Express». Краткое содержание книги:
We contemplate for the same reasons we travel: to see the world from a different perspective, to unearth hidden beauty and find new ways of being. We want to learn how to embrace wonder. Face regrets. Sustain hope.
Eric Weiner, *New York Times* bestselling author of *The Geography of Bliss* , combines his twin passions for philosophy and global travel in a pilgrimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from philosophers around the world, from Marcus Aurelius to Arthur Schopenhauer, Confucius to Montaigne. Traveling by train (the most thoughtful mode of transport) he traversed thousands of miles, making stops in Athens, Delhi,...
The Buddhist concept of mujo, or impermanence, holds clues. Life is ephemeral. Everything we know and love will one day cease to exist, ourselves included. Most cultures fear this fact. A few tolerate it. The Japanese celebrate it.
“The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty,” wrote Yoshida Kenkō, a fourteenth-century Buddhist monk. He suggests we pay more attention to branches about to blossom or a garden strewn with faded flowers rather than blossoms in full bloom. The cherry blossom is lovely not despite its short life span but because of it. “Beauty lies in its own vanishing,” says Japan scholar Donald Richie.
Appreciating life’s small, fleeting pleasures demands a loose grip. Hold them too tightly and they break. What has been said of Thoreau applies equally to Shōnagon. “He is paying attention to things, but he is not grasping them, manipulating them, trying to figure them out.”
This skill does not come naturally to me. My grip is too tight. I am always trying to figure things out, unearthing hidden meanings that may or may not exist. As for impermanence, it terrifies me.
Shōnagon loves many objects but none more than paper. Writing like a wine connoisseur in Burgundy, she recalls the time she laid her hands “on some Michinoku paper.” Paper and wood were thought to possess a divine kami, or spirit. Craftsmen made the most cherished objects from wood: gold-lacquered boxes containing sutra scrolls, sandalwood boxes inlaid with mother-of-pearl, painted screens, mirrors, writing brushes, inkstands, musical instruments, go sets. Even today in Japan, everyday materials such as paper, wood, and straw receive as much attention and celebration—and sometimes more—as luxurious materials, such as gold or precious stones.
I feel Shōnagon’s paper love. Whenever I’m in Tokyo, I make a point to visit Itoya in the Ginza district. Itoya is a stationery store, but that’s like saying Yo-Yo Ma is a cellist: technically correct but woefully inadequate. Spread across two buildings and eighteen floors, it is a vertical ode to the analog: Italian-leather planners, sublime notebooks, exquisite pens. Everyone, shoppers and staff alike, shares this love of the tactile. No one rushes you. Fondling is encouraged. I could spend hours—days!—in Itoya, and I’m sure Shōnagon could, too.
Something need not be in pristine condition for her to find it delightful. Many of the objects she celebrates are old, worn—even dirty. She prefers not carefully tended ponds but “the sort that have been left neglected to the rampant water weed, where patches of reflected moonlight gleam whitely on the water here and there between the swathes of green.”
The Japanese call this fondness for the imperfect wabi Wabi is a frayed kimono or a cherry blossom lying forlorn on the ground or a “complete” collection of Shakespeare missing a play or two. If you’ve ever bought torn jeans or a distressed-leather bag, you have bowed to wabi.
For someone so quick to expose others, to shine a bright light on their charms and flaws, Sei Shōnagon reveals little of herself on the page. We know only the basics. She was born about AD 966 and was appointed to the court of Empress Teishi. She did whatever Empress Teishi wanted or needed or might conceivably want or need in the future. In exchange, Shōnagon was given room and board in the Imperial Palace in Kyoto and access to a world of beauty. Not a bad arrangement.
Shōnagon’s world was highly circumscribed, geographically bounded by the walls of the Imperial Palace and the adjoining gardens, socially demarcated by the invisible but no less formidable wall that separated the aristocracy from everyone else. You’d think such a confined world would dull the senses of its inhabitants, yet it had the opposite effect: it heightened people’s perceptions. Shōnagon lived in a nook. A beautiful nook.
I am in a taxi, heading to the Imperial Palace. I decide to walk the last few blocks. I’d like to say I walk mindfully, like Rousseau, but that would be a lie. I walk mindlessly, my head and feet not on speaking terms.
I step inside the walls of the palace and the adjoining gardens, as appealing today as they were in the tenth century. It’s an enormous compound; rows of cherry blossoms and orange trees lead to a collection of cedar buildings that blend naturally into their surroundings.
As I walk, the summer sun hot on my neck, sweat soaking my shirt, I imagine Sei Shōnagon’s world. She came of age during the Heian period. Heian means “peace.” Warring factions sheathed their swords and reached for the calligrapher’s brush. Historian Ivan Morris calls the period, which lasted from AD 794 to 1185, “the cult of beauty.”
I love that. If I ever join a cult (always a possibility, given my utopian leanings and well-documented naïveté), this is the one for me. No other civilization, with the possible exception of Renaissance Italy, held beauty in such high regard and went to such lengths to cultivate it as Heian Japan. They wrote poetry. They played music. They created exquisite gardens. They mixed incenses with a fierce single-mindedness today reserved for Kona coffee and fantasy football.
The Heian Japanese internalized the artistic impulse, rendering it invisible the way rafters and beams and other supporting structures of a well-designed building are rendered invisible. Life was art and art was life, so closely linked as to be inseparable. The Japanese of the time prized the aesthetic experience more than abstract speculation. More important than what you knew was how you saw, how you listened, and, yes, how you smelled.
Heian Japan valued all the arts but none more so than poetry. Poetry punctuated every milestone of life: birth, courtship, and even death. A respectable Heian gentleman left this world with a parting poem. The good poet could win a lover’s heart, or earn a promotion. A bad poet was mercilessly mocked.
It wasn’t enough to write a beautiful poem. You had to package it beautifully, too. Imagine you’re living in Kyoto of AD 970 and you want to send a message to someone. What do you do?
First, you must choose the paper. Not any paper will do. It must be the “proper thickness, size, design and color to suit the emotional mood that one wished to suggest, as well as the season of the year and even the weather of the particular day.” Then you produce several drafts, experimenting with different compositions and brushes. Once satisfied with the words and the calligraphy, you fold the paper in one of several accepted styles, then attach an appropriate branch or spray of blossom. Finally, you summon “a smart, good-looking messenger,” dispatch him to the proper address, and wait for a reply. Your poem might be met with approval or derision or, worst of all, silence. Ghosting is not a twenty-first-century invention.
When I learn of these elaborate poetry rituals, I can’t help but compare them with our email rituals, such as they are. Sure, I choose the font, and perhaps an emoji or two, but no one has ever questioned the scent of my emails or the aroma of my text messages. Email is convenient, but convenience is never free. It always carries a hidden cost, a “convenience tax,” one exacted in intimacy lost and beauty forfeited. Consciously or not, we gladly pay this tax. The people of Heian Japan did not.
They would find our soulless, scent-free missives not only aesthetically wanting but ethically suspect. Immoral. In Japan beauty was—and to an extent still is—considered a moral virtue. A morally upstanding person is an aesthetically attuned one. Beauty is an essential ingredient not only for the good life but the good person, too. Making the world a bit more beautiful is a generous, selfless act. It is ethical behavior, no different from the courage of a brave soldier or the compassion of a wise judge or, as Simone Weil believed, the loving heart of an attentive person.