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December 28, 2021 - January 11, 2022
NOW THAT I’M GETTING ON A BIT, I OCCASIONALLY FEEL like the Japanese poet-philosopher Basho, who, after many years spent travelling in search of wisdom along the Narrow Road to the Deep North in Edward Bond’s play of that name, is asked what he has learned, and replies, ‘I learned that there is nothing to learn in the Deep North.’ Nothing to learn on the journey is the wisdom of the journey, wisdom itself being the grand illusion.
“松下问童子，言师采药去”
WE DO NOT LIVE in magical times. The world is dark and literature responds to it with dystopias. Many of the most highly praised new fictions are remarkable for their bleakness.
as if we now live in a culture that endlessly cannibalises itself, so that, in the end, it will have eaten itself up completely.
What do you preserve? What do you jettison? What is changeable, and where must you draw the line? The questions are always the same, and the way we answer them determines the quality of the adaptation, of the book, the poem, or of our own lives.
