Quote of the Day (The Monk Kenko, on “Longing in All Things for the Past”)

“When I sit down in quiet meditation, the one emotion hardest to fight against is a longing in all things for the past. After the others have gone to bed, I pass the time on a long autumn’s night by putting in order whatever belongings are at hand. As I tear up scraps of old correspondence I should prefer not to leave behind, I sometimes find among them samples of the calligraphy of a friend who has died, or pictures he drew for his own amusement, and I feel exactly as I did at the time. Even with letters written by friends who are still alive I try, when it has been long since we met, to remember the circumstances, the year. What a moving experience that is! It is sad to think that a man’s familiar possessions, indifferent to his death, should remain unaltered long after he is gone.”—Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenko (c. 1683-1350), from his Essays on Idleness, translated by Donald Frame, excerpted in The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, selected by Phillip Lopate (1994)