Believing the Season

Last week, the principal of one of my schools invited me to go to a concert of Christmas choirs performing Japanese songs as well as the works of John Rutter. It was a nice time and he also gave me a ticket to Toji, a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, and I used it yesterday.

This was my second visit to Toji so I concentrated on trying to take interesting photos. It was afternoon on a cloudy day so there was some dramatic light.

The Japanese maples still had their beautiful autumn leaves.

The Japanese heron enjoys his new fame, courtesy of Miyazaki Hayao.

A few days ago, I learned my two year old nephew, River, is very sick and in the hospital. So I bought some charms for him at Toji, one for health and one for the protection of children. I suppose it'll take about two weeks for them to get to him, though.

I ate lunch at a nearby mall in a crowded foodcourt. I just got some KFC, I suppose because the Christmas season has started (KFC is a traditional Christmas food in Japan). On the long train ride to and from Kyoto, I read Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy (1579) and Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (1592 or 93) . Yes, I carried the Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume 1, in my bag for the whole time. Not the slimmer volumes they make now but the big cinder block that contains material from the fifth century to the 18th. Lately I've been reading Saint Augustine again, City of God, as a refresher for my comic and Augustine's hatred for art and poetry was getting me down. Sidney cheered me up, even if Defence of Poesy is kind of a sloppy work.

In a way, I can sympathise with people who dislike fiction because they believe it consists entirely of lies. I don't generally like even polite lies myself, I think they're a waste of time. But having found myself arguing in recent years with people who basically dislike fiction for that reason, my counterargument is given by Sidney in this famous quote:

Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth; for, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false: so as the other artists, and especially the historian, affirmeth many things, can, in the cloudy knowledge of mankind, hardly escape from many lies: but the poet, as I said before, never affirmeth; the poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writeth: he citeth not authorities of other histories, but even for his entry calleth the sweet Muses to inspire into him a good invention; in troth, not labouring to tell you what is or is not, but what should or should not be.

This is why the increasing preference for non-fiction over fiction worries me. I say that as someone who certainly enjoys reading and viewing forms of non-fiction. Fiction exercises the brain in a way that non-fiction is deficient.