In Spring it is the dawn

"In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful. As the light creeps over the hills, their outlines are dyed a faint red and wisps of purplish clouds trail over them.

In summer the nights. Not only when the moon shines, but on dark nights too, as the fireflies flit to and fro, and even when it rains, how beautiful it is!

In autumn the evenings, when the glittering sun sinks close to the edge of the hills and the crows fly back to their nests in threes and fours and twos; more charming still is a file of wild geese, like specks in the distant sky. When the sun has set, one's heart is moved by the sound of the wind and the hum of the insects.

In winter the early mornings. It is beautiful indeed when snow has fallen during the night, but splendid too when the ground is white with frost; or even when there is no snow or frost, but it is simply very cold and the attendants hurry from room to room stirring up the fires and bringing charcoal, how well this fits the season's mood! But as noon approaches and the cold wears off, no one bothers to keep the braziers alight, and soon nothing remains but piles of white ashes."

- Words written in Japan more than a thousand years ago.

(One thought, books written two centuries ago somehow can still resonate with those written 10 centuries ago. Last 2-3 centuries have changed the world, distances, contexts, cultural pockets, face of earth, agricultural expansion, urban population, industries, services, art, day jobs, family relations, houses, cities, night sky, electricity, phones, photos, video, internet, ever-connected placement of people, their thought patterns, mindspace organisation, daydreams, visual contexts, imagination space, concerns, and mostly the nudity of language and contexts. All makes the literature of today, so alien from even that of two centuries ago. No good or bad. Just that this point in history seems so so different from many other, and so new, young and inexperienced amongst these new contexts.)