Japanese Topics

I am a lantern—
My head a moon
Of japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
—Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)

Almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound: this is my proposition. That “savage animal” has not really been “mortified”; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become—divine. What constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty; what seems agreeable in so-called tragic pity, and at bottom in everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate shudders of metaphysics, receives its sweetness solely from the admixture of cruelty. What the Roman in the arena, the Christian in the ecstasies of the cross, the Spaniard at an auto-da-fe or bullfight, the japanese of today when he flocks to tragedies, the laborer in a Parisian suburb who feels a nostalgia for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne who “submits to” Tristan and Isolde, her will suspended—what all of them enjoy and seek to drink in with mysterious ardor are the spicy potions of the great Circe, “cruelty.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

And like that game with which the japanese amuse themselves by dipping in a porcelain bowl of water, small bits of paper which, until then were indistinct, but, scarcely plunged in the water, stretch, distort, become colored, differentiated, turn into flowers, houses, substantial and recognizable personages,in the same manner all the flowers in our garden and those of Mr. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies of the Vivonne, and the good people of the village and their little homes and the church and all of Combray and its environs, all this which takes shape and solidifies, has come, town and gardens, from my cup of tea.
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)