My collection of classical Japanese texts.
Early Classical Period (Nara, late 8th century)
- The Kojiki: Records of Ancient Matters
- The Ten Thousand Leaves: Poems from the Man’yōshū
Mid Classical Period (Heian, 9th–12th centuries)
- The Kokinshū: Selected Poems
- The Tale of Genji
- The Pillow Book (Makura no Sōshi)
- The Tales of Ise (Ise Monogatari)
Late Classical / Medieval Period (Kamakura to Muromachi, 12th–16th centuries)
War Tale Cycle:
- Hōgen Monogatari: Tale of the Disorder in Hōgen
- The Ten Foot Square Hut and Tales of the Heike
Other Medieval Canon:
- Hōjōki (An Account of My Hut)
- Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa)
- The No Plays of Japan
- The Taiheiki: A Chronicle of Medieval Japan
Early Modern Period (Edo, 17th–18th centuries)
- Four Major Plays of Chikamatsu
- The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (Oku no Hosomichi)
There’s a lot more sex and penises in this book than I expected. I realized perhaps I initially misread the title, it’s not ABOUT blue but about BEING blue. Whether this explains my surprise or not, I don’t know.
Quotes: “In ‘go to hell' and ‘fuck you,’ the words have been glued together by thoughtless use and mindless custom. We do not speak them the way we speak ordinary sentences. They are not said, but recited, like ave marias…”
Furthermore, the sense of passion or of power, of depth and vibrancy, feeling and vision, we take away from any work is the result of the intermingling, balance, play, and antagonism between these: it is the arrangement of blues, not any blue itself, which lets us see the mood it formulates, whether pensive melancholy or thoughtless delight, so that one to whom aesthetic experience comes easily will see, as Schopenhauer suggested, sadness in things as readily as smoky violet or moist verdigris.
Yes, once blue signified, not sky, but Heaven, against which the figures of the gods burned like suns.
Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet thick dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.
So it always is as we approach the source of our desires. As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks; I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour.
