Taste is not necessarily wholly positive or efficient. In 1930 the Japanese philosopher Kuki Shuzo wrote an essay attempting to define a Japanese cultural value called iki, which amounted to a kind of urbane world-weariness, a pronounced ambivalence in all aspects of life. (W. David Marx, an American writer and friend of mine long living in Tokyo, compared it to aspects of New England WASPiness.) Love, money, and beauty could all be as easily lost as gained, and gaining may not always be better than losing. Absence must be appreciated as much as presence. “Iki is understood as a superior form
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