How Do You Live?

by Genzaburo Yoshino

there may be nothing more deep-rooted and stubborn than the human tendency to look at and think of things with themselves at the center.

Even among adults, the human tendency to think about things and form judgments with ourselves at the center remains deep-rooted.

In the world at large, people who are able to free themselves from this self-centered way of thinking are truly uncommon. Above all, when one stands to gain or lose, it is exceptionally difficult to step outside of oneself and make correct judgments, and thus one could say that people who are able to think Copernicus-style even about these things are exceptionally great people. Most people slip into a self-interested way of thinking, become unable to understand the facts of the matter, and end up seeing only that which betters their own circumstances.

Still, as long as we held fast to the thought that our own planet was at the center of the universe, humanity was unable to understand the true nature of the universe—and likewise, when people judge their own affairs with only themselves at the center, they end up unable to know the true nature of society. The larger truth never reveals itself to them.

If it means anything at all to live in this world, it’s that you must live your life like a true human being and feel just what you feel. This is not something that anyone can teach from the sidelines, no matter how great a person they may be.

you must make a habit of thinking honestly, with your own experience as a foundation, and—Copper, this is very important!—if someone fakes this part, no matter what kind of great-sounding things they think or say, they are all lies in the end.

The most important thing—more than what other people think, more than anything—is that you should first know for yourself, truly and deeply, where human greatness lies.

There are lots of people in the world who act just for appearance’s sake—in order to seem great in the eyes of others. That type of person worries first about how they are reflected in other people’s eyes, and they inadvertently end up neglecting their true selves, as they really are. I hope you don’t become that sort of person.

December commenced with four or five days of warm weather, in which the students leaned against the south-facing school building and basked drowsily in the sun, but around the tenth of the month, suddenly a cold day came along. Then the clouds piled up, layer upon layer in the sky like old cotton, and soon the cold became bone chilling. It started to seem like snow couldn’t be far away now.

Beautiful

And we don’t want to cause needless embarrassment to people, so we must not forget to make a habit of modesty and restraint in our lives.

You and I, too, because we are human, must live with only our value as human beings in mind, not thinking we are unimportant if we happen to be poor or that we are great because we lead a wealthy life.

Because a human being who doesn’t understand the essentials of being human, in other words, is a pitiful fool.

Despite that, the sad truth is that in today’s world, the people who will be in the most trouble if they get hurt are the people who are in the greatest danger of getting hurt.

So why, in a society of such advanced civilization as ours, does such a repugnant state of affairs remain in existence? Why has such misery not been eradicated in this world?

People working in great hardship and those of us living in relative happiness are completely cut off from each other in our daily lives, but actually we are bound together by an unbreakable net.

So if we don’t care about those people and we live thinking only of our own happiness, that is wrong, is it not?

But when you try changing your point of view, these people are the very ones bearing this entire world on their shoulders.

If nobody made anything, there would be no tastes, no pleasures—consumption would be impossible. The work of making things itself makes it possible for people to be truly human. This is not just a matter of food and clothing. In the academic world, in the art world, the producers are needed far more than the consumers.

And you’ll find, too, among those who are most often looked down upon, that there are many people to whom we should bow our own heads.

But if a person can go to a place where they can say they no longer need their life, even when they’re not desperate or crazy, well, that’s what I think is fantastic.”

If you lose pierced by this spirit, then it’s not a loss. If you win but you are missing this spirit, you can’t really call yourself a winner.”

His biography sells briskly all over the world.

If so, then we can admire Napoleon’s great vitality, and while we do, we can also ask the question, “What in the world did Napoleon, with this wonderful vitality, accomplish?”

And with extraordinary abilities, isn’t it possible that one might just as easily accomplish extraordinarily bad things?

First, you might notice that the great people and heroes that loomed so large in your eyes until now were, ultimately, no more than drops of water drifting in that great stream. Next, you’d surely see that no matter what things those extraordinary people did, they were exceptionally fleeting, unless their work was firmly bound to the current of the stream.

The world is full of people who are not bad, but weak, people who bring unnecessary misfortune upon themselves and others for no reason but weakness. A heroic spirit that’s not devoted to human progress may be empty and meaningless, but goodness that is lacking in the spirit of heroism is often empty as well.

At the same time, he had become keenly aware that a person’s conduct was made up of actions that, once done, could not be undone, and that was a truly scary thing. Even if nobody else knew what you’d done, you yourself knew, and what’s more, even if you could somehow forget completely, once you’d done a thing, there was no changing that fact. There was absolutely no way afterward to deny to yourself that you were that sort of person.

“But, Jun’ichi, if that should happen, it will never be to your loss! If you think only of that one thing, you’ll never be able to change it, but if your regrets help you to really learn an essential thing about being human, that experience won’t have been wasted on you.

You could say that when we feel pain, the pain is telling us that conditions are not normal in our bodies. If we didn’t feel any pain at all, even when something went wrong, we might not realize it, and depending on the circumstances, that might cost us our lives.

We learn true humanity from a pain that only humans feel, even in the midst of experiencing all the same pain as other living things.

But among all those miseries, there’s one that pierces our hearts most deeply, that wrings the bitterest tears from our eyes. It’s the awareness that we have committed a mistake that we can’t go back and fix.

I’m afraid there’s nothing quite so painful as thinking, What have I done?

“Error has the same relationship to truth as sleeping does to waking. I have seen that when one wakes from error, one turns to truth again as if revived.”

“‘Art and knowledge know no borders.’

I think there has to come a time when everyone in the world treats each other as if they were good friends. Since humanity has come so far, I think now we will definitely be able to make it to such a place. So I think I want to become a person who can help that happen.