Volume II Part 8 (1/2)

I translated into Hearnian dialect all you said And my wife, whose name is Setsu, or Chi-yo (alternative), knows you well by your photograph, and said such nice things about that photograph that I dare not tell you Which is all the more extraordinary because when I showed her soirls all said that if they should ever meet such people they would ”becolish faces--their deep-set eyes--terrify unsophisticated japanese Children cry with fear at the sight of a foreigner So your photo must reveal exceptional qualities to ets drunk here to-day; but a cultivated japanese is never offensively drunk To get _properly_, politely drunk upon sake is the _suentleman kno to act, however drunk, it is the custohts hi, and thank hi for any _possible_ mistakes

Of course, there are no ladies at eisha_

Work progresses; but the barrier of language is a serious one My project to study Buddhism must be indefinitely delayed on that account

For the deeper mysteries of Buddhism cannot be explained in the Hearnian dialect

What some people say about Miss Bisland--ah! Ionly beautiful when she wants to be is, I think, perfectly true She can change into seventeen different women She used to make hed to scorn the terrible scientific test of the photograph--of the science which reveals new _nebulae_ and tells a et the small-pox or not No two photos of her ever represented the sa called _Ego_, which is not ”I” but ”They,” is worked up into a recognizable composite photo But in her case, 'tis quite otherwise The different dead that live in her, live quite separately from each other, in different rooms, and receive upon different afternoons And yet--if even Rudyard Kipling were to write the truth about that person--or rather that ghostly congregation of persons called Elizabeth Bisland,--who but a crazy ht to think hiet tired of Elizabeth is out of human possibility There are tooto different historical epochs, countries, and conditions If he should tire of one Elizabeth,--lo!

there will appear another And there is one very terrible Elizabeth, wholimpse of once, and whom it will not be well for Mr W or anybody else to sulad for the compound Elizabeth that she has this Protector in reserve--Lord!

how irreverently I have been talking! But that is because you can read under the irreverence

What can't be insured against is earthquake I have become afraid

Do you know that the earthquake the other day in Gifu, Aichi, etc, destroyed nearly 200,000 houses and nearly 10,000 lives? My house in far-off Matsue rocked and groaned like a steamer in a typhoon It isn't the quake one's afraid of: it is being held down under a ton of timber and slowly burned alive That is what happened to most of the dead Five millions of dollars will scarcely relieve the distress

Well, here's a thousand happy New Years to you and yours,--all luck, all blessings, all glorious sensations

Ever from your old disoccidentalized chum, LAFCADIO HEARN

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

ku and delightful letter from you, and Mallock's book I hate the Jesuit; but he has a particular cleverness of his own indeed I hate hiest; then I hate him because he is morbid, with a priestly 's morbidness, which is manly and full of enormous resolve and defiance in the teeth of God and hell and nature,--but the other--no! This book is not free froet boiled into thin soup, and flavoured with a dash of M de Caination; but she is excellently done Really, I don't know;--I asked myself: ”If it was I?”And conscience answered: ”If it was _you_, in spite of love and duty and honour and hellfire staring you in the face you would have gone after her,--and tried to console yourself by considering the Law of Attraction of Bodies and Souls in the incos, which is older than the Gods” And I was very much inclined to demur; but conscience repeated: ”Oh! don't be such a liar and quibbler;--you know you would! That was the only part of the book you really liked Your ancestors were not religious people: you lack constitutional morality That's why you are poor, and unsuccessful, and void of mental balance, and an exile in japan You know you cannot be happy in an English moral community You are a fraud--a vile Latin--a vicious French-hearted scalawag”

And I could not say anything, because what conscience observed was true--to a considerable extent ”_Vive lea heap, because of being ht at all--at least not its eht even while they stimulate it)

Now about these Shadows Yes, there are forces about one,--vague, working soundlessly, i one as the action of air softens certain surfaces of rock while hardening others The netism of another faith about you necessarily polarizes that loose-quivering needle of desire in a man that seeks source of attraction in spite of synthetic philosophy The general belief in an infinite past and future interpenetrates one so are alarned, ”Ah! your future birth will be unhappy;” when you find two lovers drinking death together, and leaving behind the, ”This is the influence of our last birth, e broke our promise to become husband and wife;” and last, but not least, when soly: ”In the last life thou wert a woman and I a man, and I loved thee in to doubt if you do not really believe like everybody else

About the training of the senses The idea is ado, in the _Revue Politique et Litteraire_, almost exhausted it He represented a man who had cultivated his eye so that he could see the bacteria in the air, and the grain ofable to adjust his eyes to distance He had trained his ear so as to hear all sounds of growth and decomposition He had trained his nose to smell all substances supposed to have no sram of the five senses thus:--

The way impressions come to--

YOU [Illustration] ME [Illustration]

I translated it for the _T-D_

For a little while, good-bye and best happiness

LAFCADIO HEARN

TO ELLWOOD HENDRICK

kuhts about the Shadows of the East are touching You ought to be able to write so beautiful and quite new if you had time

You have been seized by the fascination oftheir thunder to the smoke-blacked sky,--cities where we live bydown a street betweenof traffic through theance, fashi+on, social duties I have been trying to deal with these two problems: ”What has been the moral value of Christianity to mankind?” and ”Why is Western civilization still in slavery to religious hypocrisy?” The answer to the former seems to be that without the brutal denial of the value of life and pleasure by Christianity, we could never have learned that the highest enjoyress can be effected only by self-sacrifice to interest and indifference to physical gratifications