Climbing a mountain path, I started to think. If you work by reason, you grow harsh. If you dip your oar into emotion, you are swept away. If you insist on having your own way, you are constrained. At all events, this world of ours is a difficult place to live. When the difficulty intensifies, you want to move to some place where living is easier. When you realize that living will be no easier wherever you move, then a poem is born and a painting comes into being.
It was no god or demon that created this world of ours. It was made by the people who live in it—you, I, and the neighbors who pass by. If the world created by these ordinary people is a difficult place to live, there is nowhere else to move to. If there is anywhere, it must be the world of the nonhuman, and that is bound to be even more unpleasant than the human world. Since there is no escape from this world, your only choice if you find it a difficult place is to accommodate yourself to it, and to make life’s brief transient moments as beautiful and pleasant as possible, even if only for a short while. Herein lies the poet’s mission, the painter’s calling. Every practitioner of the arts is precious because they soothe the human world and enrich people’s hearts.
Natsume, Sōseki. Kusamakura. 1906.
Translated by Meredith McKinney, Penguin Books, 2008.