TANIZAKI/DARKNESS

Italics by Junichiro Tanizaki, from In Praise of Shadows

Darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.

In conversation, too, we prefer the soft voice, the understatement. Most important of all are the pauses. Yet the phonograph and radio render these moments of silence utterly lifeless. And so we distort the arts themselves to curry favor for them with the machines. These machines are the inventions of Westerners, and are, as we might expect, well suited to the Western arts. But precisely on this account they put our own arts at a great disadvantage.

Perhaps this missed connection is related to the one we find blockading the passageways between the mind and the body, those abstract highways upon which death sits waiting. The body is the phonograph, failing in its so purposeful attempts to manufacture survival, so we distort the message itself to “curry favor” for it with the mind. The mind demands to be let alone, and peace is its only true goal. Lurking death is transformed and disseminated into myriad expressions of tension, distaste, discomfort, yearning – we believe it to be cathartic, this release of expression. But the translation leaves remnants behind, and death continues to troll the highways.

The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows.

As long as we shower blinding white light onto everything we can at all times and in every circumstance, we will be blind. It is a terrible blindness, to believe in a truth derived only as it is found – bathed in light and stark comprehension. The darkness of a shadow reveals more about the dynamic and character of a place than washed out electrical lighting can. The relationship between darkness and light is the relationship between all things.

A fool investigates every corner of his room with a flashlight and believes he knows it perfectly.