"Under that title Kawabata talked about a unique kind of mysticism which is found not only in Japanese thought but also more widely Oriental thought. By 'unique' I mean here a tendency towards Zen Buddhism. Even as a twentieth-century writer Kawabata depicts his state of mind in terms of the poems written by medieval Zen monks. Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth. According to such poems words are confined within their closed shells. The readers can not expect that words will ever come out of these poems and get through to us. One can never understand or feel sympathetic towards these Zen poems except by giving oneself up and willingly penetrating into the closed shells of those words."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Nobel laureates in LiteratureScience fiction authorsExistentialistsEssayists from JapanShort story writers from Japan
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kenzabur%C5%8D_%C5%8Ce
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Kenzaburō Ōe
42 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Kenzaburō Ōe →
Related Quotes
"The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. The…"
"Now I was just a transient in the valley, a one-eyed passerby too fat for his years, and life there had the power to …"
"Every time you stand at a crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you; one loses all relatio…"
"To repeat the error by exhibiting, through the construction of nuclear reactors, the same disrespect for human life i…"
"The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Eur…"
"One day Bird had approached his father with this question; he was six years old: Father, where was I a hundred years …"
"It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abund…"
"Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work."
"The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live."
"We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon as possible (even something as petty …"