The opening paragraphs of no. 137 of Kenko's Essays in Idleness run, as translated by Keene, as follows, with some excerpting:
Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only
when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring—these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration. Are poems written on such themes as Going to view the cherry blossoms
only to find they had scattered
or On being prevented from visiting the blossoms
inferior to those on Seeing the blossoms
? People commonly regret that the cherry blossoms scatter or that the moon sinks in the sky, and this is natural; but only an exceptionally insensitive man would say, This branch and that branch have lost their blossoms. There is nothing worth seeing now.
In all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting. Does the love between men and women refer only to the moments when they are in each other's arms? The man who grieves over a love affair broken off before it was fulfilled, who bewails empty vows, who lets his thoughts wander to distant skies, who yearns for the past in a dilapidated house—such a man truly knows what love means.
The moon that appears close to dawn after we have long waited for it moves us more profoundly than the full moon shining cloudless over a thousand leagues …
And are we to look at the moon and the cherry blossoms with our eyes alone? How much more evocative and pleasing it is to think about the spring without stirring from the house, to dream of the moonlit night though we remain in our room!
Such a man, or such a room-dweller, has yielded overmuch to the temptation to indulge in melodrama, perhaps. About some of the examples in the first paragraph we might wonder: is to be thus so deeply moving, or is to look one one thus what is moving? In some cases the onlooker can look on himself as another (though it might be necessary for some of the effect that the onlooker be looking specifically on himself as another—such complicated states we can get ourselves into!—if only because that way one is likelier to avoid the impression that the whole proceeding is ridiculous or pathetic in a derogatory way): the one who longs for the moon or strolls amid the fallen blossoms might do so while thinking how moving, how poignant, it is to long for the moon while it is obscured by rainclouds. Back when I was the sort of person who would read up on his leisure pursuits I read a book whose title I've been misremembering ever since (substituting "aesthetic" for "artistic"), more or less about this topic, which was not really particularly informative (or well written) in itself, though it certainly contained a lot of bibliographic information—in fact now that I think of it I think it's what spurred me to locate Kenko's essays, having been spurred to get it by reading Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows. It also caused me to spend a lot of time looking for Natsume Soseki's Three-Cornered World, a book whose title in Japanese would literally translate as Grass Pillow, which is much more evocative, but was not used by the translator because "grass pillow" has (or so he says) a specific allusive significance which does not exist in English. ("Three-cornered world" is a phrase explained in the novel itself, but not obviously better as a title for that.) Its narrator simply cannot avoid looking at the aesthetic resonance of his actions as he acts, which makes for a rather boring book, actually. He is generally far too meditative a sort to enact artistically ingenious murders, for instance (nor would such things provide the sort of being moved at issue, anyway). Kokoro, which I got indirectly as a result of this quest, it having been much easier to find and by the same author, is a lot better, partly because the characters, for all that their worrying about what they do, don't worry too much about that aspect.
At any rate, the person unaware of the passing of spring can hardly be moved by his unawareness. And the interest that attaches to beginnings and endings may not at all be felt by the ones directly involved until the middles or after the endings are well past, but might be transparent to a spectator all along. The very next, and much shorter, essay (the work is called Essays in Idleness, but some of them are only a few sentences long) is explicitly spectatorial:
Once, after the Festival had ended, a certain person had all the hollyhock leaves removed from his blinds, with the remark that they were no longer of any use. I felt that this showed a want of taste, but since he was a person of quality, I supposed he must have his reasons. … The prose prefaces to old poems sometimes also say, Sent attached to some withered hollyhocks
. The Pillow Book contains the passage, Things which arouse nostalgia for the past—withered hollyhocks
. This seems to me a wonderfully evocative observation.
I have tended to think of the remarks in 137 as being as much about, or at least as applicable to, depictions, as about/applicable to how one might conduct oneself (despite that some of it is explicitly about conduct: The man of breeding never appears to abandon himself completely to his pleasures; even his manner of enjoyment is detached
). It would be coarse to demand that what would otherwise seem to be the main interest be what is mainly depicted; it could even be left out entirely and only present in its refracted form, or shown only by way of its contours, at some remove.
I thought for a while that it would be interesting, or possible, to begin a film by following a person who does not otherwise figure in it, walking on some daily route, in such a way that those whom it really is mainly about, walking behind him, only occasionally come into view (his progress being occasionally impeded, or their speed occasioanlly increasing), and their conversation audible only as clearer than usual background chatter (background because they are not the overt focus) in those intervals, so that it is only when this person disappears into his destination that these others are finally the obvious subject of the shot, until they, too, soon thereafter disperse. Which perhaps means that I was more apt than most to greatly enjoy Ivy Ho's Claustrophobia—the little summary on that page says that the movie tells the story of an office romance that never really happens
, but that's not really accurate (or anyway, you can't be sure whether it's accurate); what you can say is that it tells the story of what might be an office romance, but it's never really depicted. There aren't even very many scenes in which the two subjects of the romance are alone together. There is something that is almost certainly, but not necessarily, a rendezvous, but one of the parties never arrives and the purpose of the meeting, if it was actually a planned meeting, is never made plain. Enough is explicitly revealed that we can recognize what we are denied but for the most part we're presented only with significant moments around the story.
Very effective! A friend has suggested that The Willowdale Handcar operates according to similar principles. As might The Object-Lesson, except that in that case it's very hard to tell whether the various scenes actually do hang together.
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