“Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.”
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About this line
It’s the last sentence of the first chapter. The pages before it are angry: the West and the East misreading each other, “the Cyclopean struggle for wealth and power.” Then he stops arguing. “Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea.”
The afternoon glow is on the bamboos, he writes, and the kettle is singing. This line is the exhale that follows. Okakura wrote the book in English, for Western readers, so these are his own words.
Why we carry this line
I was living right on the gulf. Sunsets were glorious. I got tired of using the same words to describe them. I went looking for new words, and found evanescence. Hadn’t thought about it in years. Until this quote.
The design
The sentence splits in two, with a long pause between the halves. In Japanese design that charged empty space has a name: ma. “Evanescence” is the largest word on the shirt and the faintest, so the word for fading is the first thing to fade.
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