Das Pathetisch-Erhabene
"Beauty is not external, but already in the mind."
M o n o n o a w a r e 物の哀れ:
Literally "the pathos of things"), also translated as "an empathy toward things," or "a sensitivity of ephemera," is a Japanese term used to describe the awareness of mujo or the transience of things and a bittersweet sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing. The term was coined in the eighteenth century by the Edo period Japanese cultural scholar Motoori Norinaga, and was originally a concept used in his literary criticism of The Tale of Genji, and later applied to other seminal Japanese works including the Man'yōshū, becoming central to his philosophy of literature, and eventually to Japanese cultural tradition. The word is derived from the Japanese word mono, which means "things" and aware, which was a Heian period expression of measured surprise (similar to "ah" or "oh"), translating roughly as "pathos," "poignancy," "deep feeling," or "sensitivity." Thus, mono no aware has frequently been translated as "the 'ahh-ness' of things." In his criticism of The Tale of Genji, Motoori noted that mono no aware is the crucial emotion that moves readers. Its scope was not limited to Japanese literature, and became associated with Japanese cultural tradition (see also sakura). Notable manga artists who use mono no aware-style storytelling include Hitoshi Ashinano, Kozue Amano, and Kaoru Mori. The quintessentially "Japanese" director Yasujiro Ozu was well known for creating a sense of mono no aware, frequently climaxing with a character saying a very understated "ii tenki desu ne" (It is fine weather, isn't it?), after both a familial and societal paradigm shift, such as daughter being married off, against the backdrop of a swiftly changing Japan. Norwegian Wood by the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is an example of this feeling as well. Ivan Morris in The World of the Shining Prince compared it to Virgil's term lacrimae rerum.
Mottainai (もったいない, 勿体無い)
Wabi-sabi (侘寂)
Momento Mori
Rainer Maria Rilke:
Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive.
You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
...But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere...
If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.
No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.
She who reconciles the ill-matched threads Of her life, and weaves them gratefully Into a single cloth - It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall And clears it for a different celebration.
May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Falling Stars:IV: Do you remember still the falling stars that like swift horses through the heavens raced and suddenly leaped across the hurdles of our wishes - do your recall? And we did make so many! For there were countless numbers of stars: each time we looked above we were astounded by the swiftness of their daring play, while in our hearts we felt safe and secure watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate, knowing somehow we had survived their fall.
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.
We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them…
Strangely, I heard a stranger say, I am with you.
For one human being to love another, that is perhaps the most difficult of all out tasks, the unlimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preperation.
S u b l i m e P a t h o s :
In the many works of Friedrich Schiller, "Sublime Pathos" (German, das Pathetisch-Erhabene) appears as a privileged aesthetic concept. According to Schiller, sublime pathos in the context of art demonstrates human freedom and triumph in the struggle against suffering. As such, pathos no longer refers to suffering itself, but rather an effect produced by overcoming suffering. Generally, Schiller links the experience of suffering to "grand ideas" - such as the idea of freedom; in this sense, pathos reminds one of Milton's Satan, when he cries out: "Hail, horrors, I greet thee!". Schiller's description of pathos continues to influence the use of the word today, in which such triumphant overcoming of suffering and other negative situations is seen as representing pathos.
Scene from Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker": Wishing Well - What is Hardened Never Wins.
M o n o n o a w a r e 物の哀れ:
Literally "the pathos of things"), also translated as "an empathy toward things," or "a sensitivity of ephemera," is a Japanese term used to describe the awareness of mujo or the transience of things and a bittersweet sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing. The term was coined in the eighteenth century by the Edo period Japanese cultural scholar Motoori Norinaga, and was originally a concept used in his literary criticism of The Tale of Genji, and later applied to other seminal Japanese works including the Man'yōshū, becoming central to his philosophy of literature, and eventually to Japanese cultural tradition. The word is derived from the Japanese word mono, which means "things" and aware, which was a Heian period expression of measured surprise (similar to "ah" or "oh"), translating roughly as "pathos," "poignancy," "deep feeling," or "sensitivity." Thus, mono no aware has frequently been translated as "the 'ahh-ness' of things." In his criticism of The Tale of Genji, Motoori noted that mono no aware is the crucial emotion that moves readers. Its scope was not limited to Japanese literature, and became associated with Japanese cultural tradition (see also sakura). Notable manga artists who use mono no aware-style storytelling include Hitoshi Ashinano, Kozue Amano, and Kaoru Mori. The quintessentially "Japanese" director Yasujiro Ozu was well known for creating a sense of mono no aware, frequently climaxing with a character saying a very understated "ii tenki desu ne" (It is fine weather, isn't it?), after both a familial and societal paradigm shift, such as daughter being married off, against the backdrop of a swiftly changing Japan. Norwegian Wood by the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is an example of this feeling as well. Ivan Morris in The World of the Shining Prince compared it to Virgil's term lacrimae rerum.
Mottainai (もったいない, 勿体無い)
Wabi-sabi (侘寂)
Momento Mori
Rainer Maria Rilke:
Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive.
You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
...But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere...
If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.
No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.
She who reconciles the ill-matched threads Of her life, and weaves them gratefully Into a single cloth - It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall And clears it for a different celebration.
May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Falling Stars:IV: Do you remember still the falling stars that like swift horses through the heavens raced and suddenly leaped across the hurdles of our wishes - do your recall? And we did make so many! For there were countless numbers of stars: each time we looked above we were astounded by the swiftness of their daring play, while in our hearts we felt safe and secure watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate, knowing somehow we had survived their fall.
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.
We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them…
Strangely, I heard a stranger say, I am with you.
For one human being to love another, that is perhaps the most difficult of all out tasks, the unlimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preperation.
S u b l i m e P a t h o s :
In the many works of Friedrich Schiller, "Sublime Pathos" (German, das Pathetisch-Erhabene) appears as a privileged aesthetic concept. According to Schiller, sublime pathos in the context of art demonstrates human freedom and triumph in the struggle against suffering. As such, pathos no longer refers to suffering itself, but rather an effect produced by overcoming suffering. Generally, Schiller links the experience of suffering to "grand ideas" - such as the idea of freedom; in this sense, pathos reminds one of Milton's Satan, when he cries out: "Hail, horrors, I greet thee!". Schiller's description of pathos continues to influence the use of the word today, in which such triumphant overcoming of suffering and other negative situations is seen as representing pathos.
Scene from Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker": Wishing Well - What is Hardened Never Wins.