understanding of the sadness at the heart of a good time

A newspaper review of the recent Hyde Park Blur concert had a line in it that impressed a friend. “Simultaneously euphoric and tragic, it captures the British spirit: its depth comes from an understanding of the sadness at the heart of a good time.” I think we can all relate to the feeling. A day you’ve been looking forward to turns out to be even better than your outrageous expectations, but time doesn’t slow down for it and you’re so sadly aware that it all has to end just like everything else.

There’s a great Japanese expression that points to this feeling called mono no aware (物の哀れ). My dictionary credits it to the 18th-century literary scholar Norinaga Moto’ori who recovered The Tale of Genji from the doldrums of general disinterest, a book that’s since transformed into the shining eight-ball of Japanese literary history (I haven’t read it.) Word for word, mono is ‘object’ or ‘thing’, no is basically ‘of’, and aware – this is where translation gets a little more tricky – could be ‘pity’. In combination we get something like ‘the pathos of all things.’

Turning now to the the wisdom of our world’s collective consciousness, we get a couple of other good suggestions:  ‘an empathy towards things’ and a pretty accurate if heavy-handed ‘sensitivity towards ephemera’. At this point I would have had a go at coming up with a killer sentence that brings out once and for all all the subtle connotations of the term, but I’ve sadly spotted an infallible, tried-and-tested, team-worked wikipedia definition which I shouldn’t try and beat: “mono no aware is a term used to describe the transience of things and a bittersweet sadness at their passing.” Bam.

As far as our Moto’ori is concerned mono no aware is what lies at the heart of all beauty, and is the ultimate literary aesthetic. Off the top of my head, and for my own indulgence, it’s what we could say David Lynch’s brilliant if uncharacteristic The Straight Story and Fellini’s timeless La Dolce Vita draw their poignancy from in the film world. In Japan, Yasujiro Ozu (related to Moto’ori, apparently) is the time-honoured master of it. And, crucially, it’s an idea explicitly honoured in Japan’s traditional hanami flower viewing ceremonies that take place over a varying two-week period every year when the ephemeral cherry-blossom trees are in bloom. Its short life and its gently bright colours have made the sakura a embodiment of perfectly fragile beauty, and part of the Met Agency’s duty, come springtime, is to forecast the day they flower so Japan can plan their holidays and their boozy tribute to transience.

why it’s ok to study literature

At a glance it’s indulgent- it’s just about reading stories, and that’s what many of us do in our free time as a means to wind down after a hard day’s real work. Literature doesn’t apparently feed mouths, and undergraduates who take it up when they could have equally chosen the paths of doctors and engineers can appear annoyingly insouciant, or worse still, selfish. And I think all persistent bookworms come to this enervating realisation at some point or other, a sphinx they have to slay to gain passage to the juicier fruit out there.

Now the study of literature does not boil down to the brutal pedantry it’s depressingly famous for. It’s not about treasure-hunting for trivia, nor is it about scratching beards over whether XXX is a structuralist novel or a post-structuralist novel. Determining the correct -ism is not a very meaningful goal for the reader (for the librarian, yes), and those who take great pleasure in brandishing -isms in arguments are probably yet to defeat their sphinx.

The constructive and – dare I say it – the fundamentally correct way to study literature is to ask ourselves, and always be conscious of , these two simple questions:

1. What is the text trying convey?
2. How effectively does the text convey it?

The study of literature is the study of the disparity between these two things. It’s about striving to understand every little insinuation of a text and then setting out to compare and contrast our interpretation with the author’s intention. How closely does our understanding of a text match what the author had in mind to communicate? If the gap between the two is wide, why? Either our power of interpretation, or the writer’s power of representation (or indeed both) must be lacking, but how can we begin to fix it?

You see, for an idea to get from A to B, it first needs a language to carry it, like the WiFi signal that’s going to send this article to its execution in the blogosphere shortly. This is where things get messy. Language comprises a limited set of symbols (the alphabet + punctuation in the English language) while ideas are as infinite as the universe. How then does one use these symbols to the best effect? Good writers can say in one sentence what others say in five, and literature is the study of how these writers pull it off. It’s the study of knowledge, its construction, and its transmission- the nuclear physics of human to human communication.

So studying literature is not a dead-end pastime activity. It’s about developing and using the tools that make sense of our world, and, perhaps more affectingly, it’s unambiguously about bringing people closer together.

(*image texture couretsy of pareeerica)

identity crisis

My dictionary gives: ‘a period of uncertainty and confusion in which a person’s sense of identity becomes insecure, typically due to a change in their expected aims or role in society.’

Wikipedia‘s one-liner is more interesting: ‘an identity crisis is when an individual loses a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity.’

It’s this notion of ‘personal sameness’ that got me writing this article, my first entry in the inaugural ‘Language’ category that I want to develop. A while ago it struck me that etymologically, the word identity weighs anchor on the Latin idem, meaning ‘same’. The connection didn’t come naturally to me. From my understanding, identity described my uniqueness in the world- what distinguished me from others was my identity. There are some familiar verbalisms like ‘protect one’s identity’ or ‘assert one’s identity’ that appear to bolster this notion.

But Latin and Wikipedia seem to suggest the exact opposite. Far from being a measure of difference, identity wants to connote sameness, just like its cousin ‘identical’. What a juicy contrast of ideas we have here, neatly packaged into one word! So what does this ‘sameness’ point to, the same as what? What two things are we trying to bring together in our bid for identity?

The safest Japanese translation for identity crisis, and the one that comes up first in my dictionary, is 自己認識の危機 (jikoninshiki no kiki). It doesn’t sound as punchy in Japanese as the term does in English, and actually アイデンティティー・クライシス(aidentitii kuraishisu) is the more well-worn expression, indicating that it’s a Western concept through and through (in fact, the phrase is attributed to the German-American psychologist Erik Erikson, 1954). But returning to the first version, what we get when we take the Japanese literally is a ‘self-acknowledgement crisis’, or, to take it further, a mismatch between the perceiving self and the perceived self.

So there’s the duality. Identity is all about the sameness between who we want to be, and who (we think) we are perceived to be. And in light of all this, it’s interesting that we’ve come to associate the word with the contrary idea of uniqueness. Quite the personalities we have!