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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
I come out of mystery; - I see the sky and the land, men and women and their works; and I know that I
must return to mystery; - and merely what this means not even the greatest of philosophers - not even Mr.
Herbert Spencer - can tell me. We are all of us riddles to ourselves and riddles to each other; and space
and motion and time are riddles; and matter is a riddle. About the before and the after neither the
newly-born nor the dead have any message for us. The child is dumb; the skull only grins. Nature has no
consolation for us. Out of her formlessness issue forms which return to formlessness, - that is all. The
plant becomes clay; the clay becomes a plant. When the plant turns to clay, what becomes of the
vibration which was its life? Does it go on existing viewlessly, like the forces that shape spectres of
frondage in the frost upon a window-pane?
Within the horizon-circle of the infinite enigma, countless lesser enigmas, old as the world, awaited the
coming of man. Oedipus had to face one Sphinx; humanity, thousands of thousands, - all crouching
among bones along the path of Time, and each with a deeper and a harder riddle. All the sphinxes have
not been satisfied; myriads line the way of the future to devour lives yet unborn; but millions have been
answered. We are now able to exist without perpetual horror because of the relative knowledge that
guides us, the knowledge won out of the jaws of destruction.
All our knowledge is bequeathed knowledge. The dead have left us record of all they were able to learn
about themselves and the world, - about the laws of death and life, - about things to be acquired and
things to be avoided, - about ways of making existence less painful than Nature willed it, - about right
and wrong and sorrow and happiness, - about the error of selfishness, the wisdom of kindness, the
obligation of sacrifice. They left us information of everything they could find out concerning climates
and seasons and places, - the sun and moon and stars, - the motions and the composition of the universe.
They bequeathed us also their delusions which long served the good purpose of saving us from falling
into greater ones. They left us the story of their errors and efforts, their triumphs and failures, their pains
and joys, their loves and hates, - for warning or example. They expected our sympathy, because they
toiled with the kindest wishes and hopes for us, and because they made our world. They cleared the land;
they extirpated monsters; they tamed and taught the animals most useful to us. "The mother of
Kullervo awoke within her tomb, and from the deeps of the dust she cried to him, - 'I have left thee the
Dog, tied to a tree, that thou mayest go with him to the chase.'(1)" They domesticated likewise the
useful trees and plants; and they discovered the places and the powers of the metals. Later they created
all that we call civilization, - trusting us to correct such mistakes as they could not help making. The sum
of their toil is incalculable; and all that they have given us ought surely to be very sacred, very precious,
if only by reason of the infinite pain and thought which it cost. Yet what Occidental dreams of saying
daily, like the Shinto believer: - "Ye forefathers of the generations, and of our families, and of our
kindred, - unto you, the founders of our homes, we utter the gladness of our thanks"?
None. It is not only because we think the dead cannot hear, but because we have not been trained for
generations to exercise our powers of sympathetic mental representation except within a very narrow
circle, - the family circle. The Occidental family circle is a very small affair indeed compared with the
Oriental family circle. In this nineteenth century the Occidental family is almost disintegrated; - it
practically means little more than husband, wife, and children well under age. The Oriental family means
not only parents and their blood-kindred, but grandparents and their kindred, and great-grandparents, and
all the dead behind them, This idea of the family cultivates sympathetic representation to such a degree
that the range of the emotion belonging to such representation may extend, as in Japan, to many groups
and sub-groups of living families, and even, in time of national peril, to the whole nation as one great
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