a haunting moment (1)

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet....
                            Rudyard Kipling, from The Balad of East and West.



I disagree. They do meet every now and then, but the encounter is always perplexing, frustrating, annoying, sad, painful, heartbreaking, having at the same time the quality of a momentary, fleeting beauty.

What could have been, but never was. A door opened, a door closed. Just like that: no explanations given, no rationale.

A fleeting beauty that casts a long shadow, one that will never, never disappear. It will haunt you forever, however you try to forget.

No one has pondered more movingly on the perplexities of this dis/encounter than Pico Iyer in his awesome introduction to Donald Richie's no less awesome The Inland Sea, and about which I have written several times before (here and here, e.g.). Iyer's text is most appropriately titled 'A Call from the Mist'. I cannot resist leaving here the opening lines, with an implicit dedication.

Archetypal, allowing for numerous variations of gender, age, time, setting, situation. The essence is there, though. Unmistakable.

*       *       *

The foreigner in Japan, more than anywhere, stands at the edge of an intimacy that is closing slowly in his face. He walks along a beach, perhaps, as darkness falls, with a young, a beautiful girl, and they talk of loneliness, and all the places he has seen, the nights. The girl offers to introduce him to a local inn, where he will be taken care of, and they walk together up to a private room and sit by the window, looking out at the sea. Then he touches her arm, and the spell is broken. Giggling, she makes her diplomatic retreat. The next morning, when he rises to leave the small town by boat, sailing away into the mist, he sees her there, on the pier, with two friends, waiting for him with presents and goodbyes.

It is a haunting moment, and one that stands for a lifetime of such moments for those of us who find ourselves on this island of half-opened doors. It is made more touching by the fact that the girl knows she will never see the places that she dreams of; all her days will be spent in this forgotten town. And it is made more plangent by the fact that the foreigner confesses to himself (and to us) that the encounter is perplexing to him because he is "innocent despite experience" - and innocent not only because he sees no point in guilt.

Pico Iyer, 'A Call from the Mist: Introduction' in Donald Richie, The Inland Sea (1971; Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2002), pp. 5-6.