It was a concept I had long understood, but never known, before Dr. Robbins explained it in Great Works of World Literature during my senior year. Translated literally from Japanese, it means “the pathos of things,” or, interpreted less succinctly but more clearly, the idea has come to mean that fleeting beauty is all the more beautiful because of its fleetingness. All good Japanese tankas are built around this theme, and since we were all English majors, and almost half of us were minoring in Creative Writing, we were expected to write a good tanka around that theme, too. Because it isn’t hard to memorize five lines, I remember mine:

I think I love you best when
You’re strong, serious;
But then you laugh, child,
And I know how wrong I was,
How your mother loved you.

Ever since I was young, I have wanted to cling to things that are fleeting, but they’re like sand — the harder you squeeze, the faster they slip through your fingers.

At my most sentimental, emotionally volatile age (from two until about . . . ten years from now), beautiful sunsets seemed to hurt my heart. They were too beautiful to bear. I remember a family vacation when I was three, eating donuts early one Sunday morning on the rocky banks of a New Hampshire brook, and thinking, even then, that I just didn’t know what to do with all that beauty — and that I didn’t know what I would do without it when we left. When I was 18, I spent a long weekend in the Northern Georgia mountains with my parents and brother, and one blissful afternoon of that trip just journaling as I sat on a big rock slab overlooking an old mill, waterwheel spinning as fall’s bright leaves fluttered onto the mirrored surface of the pond. Again, heart pains. And again in Paris at 22, the lights of L’Tour Eiffel glittering in the dark reflection pool and the City of Light glowing in the dark. And then again, at 24, in St. Lucia for our honeymoon, whether relaxing in our hammock or enjoying breakfast at our resort’s restaurant, the Petit Piton always in view.

I know I just recently wrote about how I’ve all too often been so busy that I don’t look for life’s little beauty these days, and how my camera has begun pushing me back into the mindset I had as a three-year-old in New England. Beauty is all I’m looking for this week. And I’m trying to learn not to squeeze it, like sand. But it still hurts a little bit. If I could, I’d stick all of life’s most beautiful moments on a living Pintrest board! Since I can’t, I’ll just keep trying to savor every second, every sunset, every dewdrop. I’ll try to keep convincing myself that, if the beauty never ended, we wouldn’t think it was beautiful at all.
~ Laura