Highlights from In Praise of Shadows 📚
I finished reading In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki recently, which means it’s highlights time. 📚
As you might guess from the title, many of these passages are about the interplay between the subject and shadows / darkness.
Passages I Highlighted
Let’s Get Philosophical
Never has there been an age that people have been satisfied with.
seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are;
On Aging vs. Progress
Yet of this I am convinced, that the conveniences of modern culture cater exclusively to youth, and that the times grow increasingly inconsiderate of old people
On Elegance
If indeed “elegance is frigid,” it can as well be described as filthy.
On Beauty
The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.
And there may be some who argue that if beauty has to hide its weak points in the dark it is not beauty at all.
For a woman who lived in the dark it was enough if she had a faint, white face—a full body was unnecessary.
(This is adjacent to some of those uncomfy bits I mentioned, but this feels like a line from a poem.)
“the brushwood we gather—stack it together, it makes a hut; pull it apart, a field once more.” Such is our way of thinking—we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.
On Architecture
In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house.
The little sunlight from the garden that manages to make its way beneath the eaves and through the corridors has by then lost its power to illuminate, seems drained of the complexion of life.
A room should be brighter in winter, but dimmer in summer;
On Colors
colors built up of countless layers of darkness, the inevitable product of the darkness in which life was lived.
Then the lid is briskly lifted, and this pure white freshly boiled food, heaped in its black container, each and every grain gleaming like a pearl, sends forth billows of warm steam
On Ghosts
Japanese ghosts have traditionally had no feet; Western ghosts have feet, but are transparent. As even this trifle suggests, pitch darkness has always occupied our fantasies, while in the West even ghosts are as clear as glass.