The 50th Law - 50 Cent [97]
He wrote a series of short pieces that were not published in his lifetime but were later collected and printed under the name Essays in Idleness, the fame of this book increasing with time. Many of his observations centered on death, which was all too present in that period. But his thoughts around death went the opposite direction of brooding and morbidity. He found in them something pleasurable and even ecstatic. For instance, he pondered the evanescence of beautiful things such as cherry blossoms or youth itself. “If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” This made him think of insects that lived for only a day or a week and yet how crowded such time could be. It is the shadow of death that makes everything poignant and meaningful to us.
Kenkō continually found new ways to measure the vastness of time, as it stretches into eternity. A man was buried one day in a cemetery in view of Kenkō’s residence in Kyoto, the grave marker surrounded by grieving members of the family. As the years went by, he wrote, they would come less and less often, their feelings of sorrow slowly fading away. Within a span of time they would all be dead, and with them the memory of the man they had buried. The grave marker would become largely covered by grass. Those who would pass by centuries later would see it as a weird mix of stone and nature. Eventually it would disappear altogether, dissolving into the earth. In the face of this undeniable reality, of this eternal expanse, how can we not feel the preciousness of the present? It is a miracle to be alive even one more day.
There are two kinds of time we can experience—the banal and the sublime variety. Banal time is extremely limited in scope. It consists of the present moment and stretches out to a few weeks ahead of us, occasionally farther. Locked in banal time, we tend to distort events—we see things as being far more important than they are, unaware that in a few weeks or a year, what stirs us all up will not matter. The sublime variety is an intimation of the reality of the utter vastness of time and the constant changes that are going on. It requires that we lift our heads out of the moment and engage in the kinds of meditations that obsessed Kenkō. We imagine the future centuries from now or what was happening in this very spot millions of years ago. We become aware that everything is in a state of flux; nothing is permanent.
Contemplating sublime time has innumerable positive effects—it makes us feel a sense of urgency to get things done now, gives us a better grasp of what really matters, and instills a heightened appreciation of the passage of time, the poignancy and beauty of all things that fade away.
THE SENSE OF AWE
We are creatures that live in language. Everything we think and feel is framed by words—which never really quite express reality. They are merely symbols. Throughout history, people have had all kinds of unique experiences in which they witness something that exceeds the capacity to express it in words, and this elicits a feeling of awe. In 1915, the great explorer Ernest Shackleton found himself and his crew marooned on an ice floe near the continent of Antarctica. For months they floated in this desolate landscape, before managing to rescue themselves later the following year. During the time on the floe, Shackleton felt as if he were visiting the planet before humans had arrived on the scene—seeing something unchanged for millions of years—and despite the