A review by dragonlilly
Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō by Yoshida Kenkō

3.0

Essays notable to me:

20: "A certain hermit once said, 'There is one thing that even I, who have no worldly entanglements, would be sorry to give up, the beauty of the sky.' I can understand why he should have felt that way."

27:
"'Even menials
Of the palace staff treat me
As a stranger now;
In my unswept garden lie
The scattered cherry blossoms.'
What a lonely feeling the poem seems to convey--people are too distracted by all the festivities of the new reign for anyone to wait on the retired emperor."

29: "When I sit down in quiet meditation, the one emotion hardest to fight against is a longing in all things for the past...As I tear up scraps of old correspondence I should prefer not to leave behind, I sometimes find among them samples of the calligraphy of a friend who has died, or pictures he drew for his own amusement, and I feel exactly as I did at the time."

43, 82, 105, 217, 241