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I just read this yesterday in the New Yorker piece about JD.[1] When he was a teen-ager, Dorsey told me, he read a book about tea ceremonies and was impressed by the Japanese precept of wabi-sabi, which holds that the greatest beauty comes from organization with a dash of disorder. “The monks rake up leaves, then they sprinkle a few leaves back,” he explained. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/10/21/131021fa_fa…
I love how the East codifies aesthetics like this. My favorite is shibui which loosely translated (i'm told) means that every single detail of the object is simultaneously both useful and beautiful.
It's mostly a Japanese thing. In Chinese we don't have a lot of words for particular aesthetic qualities. However, if you want profane homophonic puns or pithy four-word idioms ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's mostly a Japanese thing. In Chinese we don't have a lot of words for particular aesthetic qualities. However, if you want profane homophonic puns or pithy four-word idioms ...
Is "pithy four-word idiom," in Chinese, a pithy four-word idiom?
I just read this yesterday in the New Yorker piece about JD.[1] When he was a teen-ager, Dorsey told me, he read a book about tea ceremonies and was impressed by the Japanese precept of wabi-sabi, which holds that the greatest beauty comes from organization with a dash of disorder. “The monks rake up leaves, then they sprinkle a few leaves back,” he explained. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/10/21/131021fa_fa…
From the timestamp and the URL — Oct 21 — was it published too early?
Just noticed that part.
From Wikipedia:
Started as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is now published
47 times annually, with five of these issues covering two-
week spans.
http://nypress.com/farm-report-wabi-sabi/
'Then my favorite fellow Bubba, Jesse Gutierrez, came by to swallow some beers. He told me that he’s been studying Japanese esthetics, and that what I was talking about was "wabi-sabi," the beauty of the humble and the imperfect. Wabi-sabi, declaimed Jesse, his thumbs hooked into the straps of his overalls, was developed to its height by 15th-century tea masters who found that the finish of Chinese Ming porcelain began to cloy. They started buying and exalting absolutely plain Korean peasant ware, stuff that was cracked, distressed, flawed. It reminded them of the beauty of nature, autumn leaves on a stone path.'
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's mostly a Japanese thing. In Chinese we don't have a lot of words for particular aesthetic qualities. However, if you want profane homophonic puns or pithy four-word idioms ...
Or maybe we had, but lost them in the history.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_of...
See also, an Italian analogue: sprezzatura. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprezzatura