Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/78

74 was actually written or completed in 712. On this book I am going to dwell presently at greater length.

Go back to the age, that is many thousand years ago, when our Japanese mind was the Japanese mind pure and true, not the Japanese mind of later age, sometimes, doubtless, refined and polished, but always wounded and tormented by the despotic counsel of Chinese literature and Buddhism, therefore the Japanese mind like the sunflower, as I said before, a seeker of sunlight and life, the Japanese mind which is the personification of life’s activity itself; you might call it the individualism, conscious or unconscious, following after the modern fashion. Let me exclaim as I exclaimed on the sunflower: “Marvel of thy every atom burning in life, how fully thou livest!” Our later Japanese spiritual history in literature or what not is more or less the history of quietism or negation in which the great charm and attraction is the thought of Cathay called death; I myself am pleased to sing on and of death because it makes life more strong, more beautiful, and more meaningful through its virtue of difference; and when I put stress upon the fusion of death with life, or upon valuing them equally, my mind thinks on the real spiritual freedom which will soon become a perfect idealism like a broader day born from the mixed souls of East and West. But when the Japanese mind