quando

o homem obscurece a sua própria escrita. queria ler light and color in Mishima mas só encontro biografias mais ou menos interessantes, masculinidade, dandy, violência e etc. entre outras coisas.

no entanto, há In Praise of Shadows, mas the Tanizaki.

(east-west)

(...)  all that can be had ready-made are those ugly Western stoves.

There are those who hold that to quibble over matters of taste in the basic necessities of life is an
extravagance, that as long as a house keeps out the cold and as long as food keeps off starvation,
it matters little what they look like. And indeed for even the sternest ascetic the fact remains that
a snowy day is cold, and there is no denying the impulse to accept the services of a heater if it
happens to be there in front of one, no matter how cruelly its inelegance may shatter the spell of
the day. But it is on occasions like this that I always think how different everything would be if
we in the Orient had developed our own science. Suppose for instance that we had developed our
own physics and chemistry: would not the techniques and industries based on them have taken a
different form, would not our myriads of everyday gadgets, our medicines, the products of our
industrial art—would they not have suited our national temper better than they do? In fact our
conception of physics itself, and even the principles of chemistry, would probably differ from that
of Westerners; and the facts we are now taught concerning the nature and function of light,
electricity, and atoms might well have presented themselves in different form.

Of course I am only indulging in idle speculation; of scientific matters I know nothing. But ha d
we devised independently at least the more practical sorts of inventions, this could not have had
profound influence upon the conduct of our everyday lives, and even upon government, religion,
art, and business. The Orient quite conceivably could have opened up a world of technology
entirely its own.

To take a trivial example near at hand: I wrote a magazine article recently comparing the writing
brush with the fountain pen, and in the course of it I remarked that if the device had been invented
by the ancient Chinese or Japanese it would surely have had a tufted end like our writing brush.
The ink would not have been this bluish color but rather black, something like India ink, and it
would have been made to seep down from the handle into the brush. And since we would have
then found it inconvenient to write on Western paper, something near Japanese paper—even
under mass production, if you will—would have been most in demand. Foreign ink and pen
would not be as popular as they are; the talk of discarding our system of writing for Roman letters
would be less noisy; people would still feel an affection for the old system. But more than that:
our thought and our literature might not be imitating the West as they are, but might have pushed
forward into new regions quite on their own. An insignificant little piece of writing equipment,
when one thinks of it, has had a vast, almost boundless, influence on our culture.

But I know as well as anyone that these are the empty dreams of a novelist, and that having come
this far we cannot turn back. I know that I am only grumbling to myself and demanding the
impossible. If my complaints are taken for what they are, however, there can be no harm in
considering how unlucky we have been, what losses we have suffered, in comparison with the
Westerner. The Westerner has been able to move forward in ordered steps, while we have met
superior civilization and have had to surrender to it, and we have had to leave a road we have
followed for thousands of years. The missteps and inconveniences this has caused have, I think,
been many. If we had been left alone we might not be much further now in a material way that we
were five hundred years ago. Even now in the Indian and Chinese countryside life no doubt goes
on much as it did when Buddha and Confucius were alive. But we would have gone only a
direction that suited us. We would have gone ahead very slowly, and yet it is not impossible that
we would one day have discovered our own substitute for the trolley, the radio, the airplane of
today. They would have been no borrowed gadgets, they would have been the tools of our own
culture, suited to us.

One need only compare American, French, and German films to see how greatly nuances of
shading and coloration can vary in motion pictures. In the photographic image itself, to say
nothing of the acting and the script, there somehow emerge differences in national character. If
this is true even when identical equipment, chemicals, and film are used, how much better our
own photographic technology might have suited our complexion, our facial features, our climate,
our land. And had we invented the phonograph and the radio, how much more faithfully they
would reproduce the special character of our voices and our music. Japanese music is above all a
music of reticence, of atmosphere. When recorded, or amplified by a loudspeaker, the greater part
of its charm is lost. 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.

Paper, I understand, was invented by the Chinese; but Western paper is to us no more than
something to be used, while the texture of Chinese paper and Japanese paper gives us a certain
feeling of warmth, of calm and repose. Even the same white could as well be one color for
Western paper and another for our own. Western paper turns away the light, while our paper
seems to take it in, to envelop it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall. It gives off no
sound when it is crumpled or folded, it is quiet and pliant to the touch as the leaf of a tree.

As a general matter we find it hard to be really at home with things that shine and glitter. The
Westerner uses silver and steel and nickel tableware, and polishes it to a fine brilliance, but we
object to the practice. While we do sometimes indeed use silver for teakettles, decanters, or sake
cups, we prefer not to polish it. On the contrary, we begin to enjoy it only when the luster has
worn off, when it has begun to take on a dark, smoky patina. Almost every householder has had
to scold an insensitive maid who has polished away the tarnish so patiently waited for.

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(todo em .pdf, here)