Segaki (20 page)

So much for this story. I do not know what to call it. It has been called Pantheism, but it is not quite that. It has been called Deism, but it is not that either. It is perhaps politeness. One bows respectfully, as one would to an empty chair, for though it is empty, still it represents a well-loved authority.

The English, like the Japanese, have always been able to do this. They may lie, murder, and oppress. All people do these things. They may ultimately be confronted with their own destruction. Most people are. But still, the two peoples, they do know the meaning of this particular lotus and of this particular rose, of dawn here, a wood of continuous trees, a sudden shower, the prospect of a hill, and the long sunset of an evening, when a breeze rustles the garden, the flowers are suddenly quiet, and it is time to go indoors.

For when the sun sets it is as though someone who had gone ahead of us had turned around to wave.

As for the invincible questions, we are not Japanese. It is our habit to ignore them.

Yet we too, by a different route, though all routes are perhaps the same, have reached a certain moment of history. For us, too, it is twilight now.

And twilight has certain particulars. The stars seep through, first green, then white when it is dark. They have altered their courses only a little this several
thousand
years, and even that alteration may only be part of
their habitual circuit, the one of which we do not know, the larger one.

Stars are not lovely things or kind. But the ability to contemplate them is a kindness. From the burned out ruins of our father’s house, which we have come to visit, we do not quite know why, living as we do now in a smaller house, we can see against the night the outlines of that landmark of our childhood, sometimes the home of evil spirits, but customarily our favourite place to play, the old, familiar, and unaltered hill.

It is enough.

And so one sends this message from a watcher to a star. One stands there, alone, in the cool night air, on the terrace, looking up, and for a moment one is filled with a restless, rich, and yet subdued content. For everybody had a garden once; it is polite to say good-bye; and if one has a little respect for history, one soon learns that the present means nothing at all. Because the message will never be received, does not mean it is not worth the sending.

Saddlebag
August-September
1957