After-Orts #53

God created war so that Americans would learn geography.
     -- Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

 

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, describes the shape-shifting kitsune: 
   The fox is never at a loss for a disguise; he can assume more forms than Proteus. Furthermore, he can make you see or hear or imagine whatever he wishes you to see, hear, or imagine. He can make you see out of time and space; he can recall the past and reveal the future…. His power has not been destroyed by the introduction of Western ideas, for did he not, only a few years ago, cause phantom trains to run upon the Tokkaido railway, thereby greatly confounding and terrifying the engineers of the company? But, like all goblins, he prefers to haunt solitary places. At night he is fond of making queer ghostly lights in semblance of lantern fires flit about dangerous places, and to protect yourself from this trick of his, it is necessary to learn that by joining your hands in a particular way, so as to leave a diamond-shaped aperture between the crossed fingers, you can extinguish the witch fire at any distance simply by blowing through the aperture in the direction of the light and uttering a certain Buddhist formula.


We should remember that even Nature’s inadvertence has its own charm, its own attractiveness. The way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven; the ridges are just by-products of the baking, and yet pleasing, somehow: they rouse our appetite without our knowing why.
     — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 3.2

…there is nothing nature loves more than to alter what exists and make new things like it. All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it. You think the only seeds are the ones that make plants or children? Go deeper.
     — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.36