loti.jpg (18K) Ah! the natural perversity of inanimate things Contemptuous pity, both for my suspicions and the cause of them Dull hours spent in idle and diffuse conversation Efforts to arrange matters we succeed often only in disarranging Found nothing that answered to my indefinable expectations Habit turns into a makeshift of attachment I know not what lost home that I have failed to find Irritating laugh which is peculiar to Japan Japanese habit of expressing myself with excessive politeness Ordinary, trivial, every-day objects Prayers swallowed like pills by invalids at a distance Seeking for a change which can no longer be found Trees, dwarfed by a Japanese process When the inattentive spirits are not listening Which I should find amusing in any one else,—any one I loved
|