Ours is an age of the obvious. Ours is an age in which men confuse raging lust with high affection, an age in which subtlety is mistaken for cowardice. Ours is an age of small passions and trivial disappointments.
There have been times and places where the importance of discretion and grace have been recognized, but ours is not such a time or place. It seems that only the crudest of emotions will pass the muster of that arbiter called public opinion, the uncrowned king of the age of majorities. We like to tell ourselves that we know what the word "love" means, and a cursory glance at the most popular songs on the Billboard charts seems to confirm this obsession. Yet, what do we find on closer examination? Invariably, the songs contain phrases of the following variety -- "One night in heaven," "I need you tonight," "Sex me," or "I want to know what love is; I want you to show me." Might this writer be forgiven for thinking that perhaps our true obsession is not with love but with sex?
Once upon a time, men and women communicated their affection for each other by such means as music, painting and poetry. The particular men and women passed away, but, in what they left behind them, their love has endured through the ages. Take for example, this poem by Karinomo no Hitomaro, a Japanese poet who lived circa 700 A.D. "In the Autumn mountains/The colored leaves are falling/If I could hold them back/I could still see her." What a beautiful poem, what a fine expression of feeling! How understated it is: yet it is this very understatement that lends it such power.
I would hazard that the tendency of the majority of those reading this would be to sneer at Hitomaro's poem. But I will say that the reason so many sneer is because they see within it a state of elevated emotion that they themselves can never aspire to, and react, as those confronted with a greater than themselves have always reacted, by denigrating it, in the hopes of cutting it down to their own size. No doubt, for these enlightened individuals, a drunken lunge at a woman's breasts is a more noble expression of feeling than a lot of hot air about autumn leaves.
We have forgotten how to feel strongly. We have forgotten because ours is an age in which that which is desired is easily granted, and whatever is easily granted is little appreciated. Relationships are easily formed and just as easily broken, with hardly a twinge of discord or regret, and this is possible because neither party to a modern relationship puts much into it. It is hard to feel rancor about failed "love" if there wasn't that much love to begin with.
Fujiwara no Atsutada, in a poem he wrote in the 10th century, expresses the turmoil that comes with intense devotion. "I think of the days/Before I met her/When I seemed to have/No troubles at all," while Karinomo no Hitomaro sighs "May those born after me/Never travel such roads of love." Lest the impression be conveyed that only the Japanese know longing, here is a poem from Anacreon, a Greek poet who lived circa 500 B.C. "The dice of Love/are madness and turmoil."
Certainly the course of true love has never run smooth. How can we, in this age, know what it is to yearn, when we have nothing worth yearning for? For us, yearning is simply the yearning for physical satisfaction, not for a state of grace, which is why those vulgar songs that confuse love with sex seem to serve us so well. For one to yearn for another, a certain degree of idealization of the other is necessary, an elevation of the other beyond the common run of humanity. In the Song of Songs, the lover says to his beloved "How beautiful you are, my darling! Oh, how beautiful! Your eyes are doves," and she says of him "His head is purest gold; his hair is wavy/and black as a raven./His eyes are like doves/by the water streams,/washed in milk,/mounted like jewels." Here is a love unsullied by vulgarity.
In Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day," the butler James Stevens is tortured by his inability to express his affection for Sally Kenton, Darlington Hall's head housekeeper. His is a tragic tale, yet a beautiful one nonetheless. The anguish Stevens must have felt, the pain, would seem unbearable to we "moderns," and yet bear them he did. Stevens bore the pain of silence because he felt it would have cost him less than the possibility of having his dreams shattered. His silence was that of a man who thinks too much of his beloved to even take the chance of losing her: we find it as easy as we do today to break our silences precisely because we think so little of those we have set our attentions upon.
Ours is truly the age of diminished souls.
