Communion
In a beautiful, elegiac tract, Yoshida Kenkō (c.1283-c.1352) reflects on the transience of earthly things, counselling detachment. He take delight, though, in encounters. ‘What happiness to sit in intimate conversation with someone of like mind, warmed by candid discussion of the amusing and fleeting ways of this world … but such a friend is hard to find, and instead you sit there doing your best to fit in with whatever the other is saying, feeling deeply alone.’
Even in such cases there is a remedy within everyone’s reach: ‘It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met’ — yet nonetheless do meet somehow through the medium of the book.
