Inspiration
Mono no Aware: The Beauty of What Passes
Mono no aware names the feeling that runs through you when something is precious because it ends. A small manifesto for a word English never kept.
You hung up with your father, and your index finger stayed a few seconds above the red button, doing nothing.
You kept a voicemail without daring to play it again, because to play it again was to start wearing it down. The last evening of a stay with the person you love, you rested your head on their shoulder and felt clearly that we were in this one for the last time. You weren't sad, you weren't happy, you were run through by something.
What you carry there has had a name for a thousand years. It's Japanese, it's called mono no aware, and it's probably the highest part of you.
The light inside the word
Mono means things. Aware is more mysterious. Originally, in the Heian court, it wasn't a noun but an interjection: a measured sigh, ah, oh, the sound you make when a face moves you, when a note tilts the room. The word drifted from interjection to the emotion itself. It's sometimes rendered as "the pathos of things," sometimes as "a sensitivity to ephemeral things." No translation holds the whole thing. (English knocks against the word like a hand against a window.)
It appears more than a thousand times in Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, the enormous novel written by a court lady at the start of the eleventh century. About once a page, like a steady pulse under the fabric of the book.
Seven hundred years later, a scholar gave the word back its full charge. Motoori Norinaga reread the Genji at a moment when everyone saw it as a disguised Buddhist sermon. He refused. In his 1799 treatise The Small Jeweled Comb, he held a thesis nobody dared hold anymore: the greatness of the matrix-book of Japan rests on no doctrine. It rests on its power to wake, in the reader, the right emotion in front of what passes. Not a lesson. An organ.
It's exactly the gesture we make elsewhere with pudor or with the innocence of the strong: picking a word up off the floor, dusting it off, giving it back its light.
The word English never kept
English has many words for the neighborhood, and none for the center.
Melancholy drags along its black bile, its tempered gloom, its lean toward depression. Nostalgia looks the wrong way, toward a past we've lost, while what was running through you was passing right now, under your fingers. Wistfulness gets warmer, gentler, but stays vague. Bittersweet names a mix, not a perception. Yearning leans toward what's absent, not toward what's still here and already going.
None of them says that the beauty is increased by its own ending, and that we perceive it while it exists. Not after, not before: during. That sharp awareness, instead of killing the moment, makes it denser.
Mono no aware isn't the sadness afterward. It's the clarity during.
Not a weakness, an organ
What you feel there isn't weakness, isn't a fragile streak in your soul. It's the opposite: the organ that makes beauty possible.
A thing that lasted forever would not be beautiful. It would just be there, indefinitely, set down. It's the imminent ending that gives the thing its shine, and it's the eye that feels that ending that sees the shine. You can't separate the two. When Yasunari Kawabata went to Stockholm in 1968 to accept the first Japanese Nobel Prize in Literature, his lecture was titled Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself.
— Yasunari KawabataWhat is truly beautiful is sad, because it is fleeting.
People read it as a complaint. It's a misreading. Beauty that lasts doesn't move us. Beauty that passes moves us because it passes.
Six centuries earlier, the monk Yoshida Kenkō wrote the same thing differently: he refused to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, or at the moon only on a clear night. Waiting for the moon behind the rain, keeping the shutters closed and feeling spring slip past without seeing it, these are deeper emotions still.
It's exactly there, in Japan, that the native writing of the word was born: three lines, seventeen syllables, the art of catching the moment that's ending while it ends. Kobayashi Issa, who lost his mother as a child, then his first wife, then nearly all of his small children, wrote, after the death of his little daughter, a poem held to be his greatest.
— Kobayashi IssaThis world of dew is a world of dew, and yet, and yet.
The and yet is the most important word in the poem. Issa knows, as a good Buddhist, that everything is as fragile as dew. He bows to the doctrine. And yet his human heart goes on loving what doesn't last. That's mono no aware: the clarity that loves anyway.
Everyday life
Take it out of the temple, bring it back into your kitchen.
It's a dead person's voice kept on an old answering machine, that you could erase with one press of your thumb and that you won't erase, and that you don't play back either, because each play, you can feel, wears it. It's the sweater she wore, that you haven't washed, because it still holds something no machine will ever give back.
It's the last evening of a trip: the table cleared, the alarm set for 5 a.m., and suddenly we talk less, laugh differently, we know. It's the feeling, watching your grandmother search for a word, of knowing in the exact moment you were watching her that this was one of the last times in that chair. You didn't cry, you didn't say anything, you just stepped slightly to the side to see her better.
It's the cherry tree that loses its blossoms in two days, and that you watch longer than usual because of it. It's the photo you didn't take, because you knew that taking it would take it from you. Often, it's less photogenic: a slant of light on a kitchen wall, a detail so small you couldn't tell anyone about it, and that, on that day, holds everything together.
(You don't need to have felt all of this. You've already felt some of it. That's enough to know that you carry the word.)
Loving with the clock on
Where mono no aware becomes something other than a private feeling in front of a landscape, is in the bond with another person.
It's also, and maybe above all, what you feel facing the person you love. At the exact moment they sleep next to you, when you look at them without them knowing, with that density of attention that only happens when you know, without wanting to put it into words, that you won't be together forever. Not necessarily because you'll leave each other. Simply because you are mortal, and the length of a shared life, however long, stays finite.
You don't truly love someone when you tell yourself "they're here." You love them when you tell yourself, without putting it into words, "they're here for now." It's that for now, gathered silently underneath, that makes you take their hand when you could just walk, that makes the goodbyes at the platform run a little too long. The heavier the projected loss, the heavier the present weighs.
It's also why we sometimes want to cry in the happiest moments. Happiness run through by the awareness that it passes overflows through the eyes, without your knowing if it's joy or its opposite. It isn't a foreboding, it's clarity from the inside. And it makes the moment worthy of respect: you don't pretend it lasts, you do it justice now.
That's exactly where the gestures that slow the passing are born. Counting the days before a return. Leaving a letter somewhere, to be opened on a day you don't choose. Preparing a whole month to give, day by day, to a person you know is precious. These aren't gifts. They are ways of holding, a little longer, the hand of what is passing.
The fourth brother
If you've made it this far, you may recognize the family.
There's the insolence that lifts its head against the gray. There's the candor that keeps its hand open after the first falls. There's the pudor that gives density to what isn't shown. Three words we'd worn down, and that we're trying to restore to their full size.
Mono no aware is the fourth. It's the gesture that says: I will not flee the emotion of what passes. I will not pretend the ending doesn't exist in order to enjoy more.
Four slopes of the same attentive heart. Insolence refuses the gray. Candor refuses the armor. Pudor refuses the display. Mono no aware refuses denial. (It's the quietest of the four. It opposes nothing. It just keeps its gaze right.)
The first three come from Latin. The fourth comes from elsewhere, and that's just as it should be. We had to go far to find it, because none of the languages we've spoken since childhood had kept it.
What we do with it
We don't do anything with it, and that's exactly right. Mono no aware isn't a self-help program. You don't even need to remember the word. If it stays, it'll resurface at the right moment, that's all.
What you do with it is what you already do without a name: you carry it. You let it run through you when it comes. You refuse, sometimes, the photo that would kill the moment. You look longer at the person you love when they aren't looking at you. You keep the sweater. You raise your eyes.
That's exactly what the Heian courtiers were doing when they wrote each other poems on plum branches. They knew nothing would last. That's why they did it.
Mono no aware isn't the sadness of what ends. It's the tender clarity of what lasts just long enough to make us look up.
You can look up. You can say nothing. You can simply, in silence, watch.
Now you know what name to put on what you were already watching.