On In Praise of Shadows

Lately, I’ve been thinking about music and my relationship to it. I’ve found, over the years, that lyrics are nowhere near as important to me as they are to some other people. In fact, it’s an odd day when I notice them at all. So, I tend to listen much more often to instrumental music.

On Saturday, I put on a few different albums and playlists, all of which relied exclusively on lyrics as ambiance. That is, the words themselves meant very little. As I nodded along to songs that I’ve listened to in the past, I caught myself wondering what I liked about them. These songs were maximalist drift phonk, and my taste has drifted so far from it as to be—effectively—unrecognizable today. As I considered what made some music work, I began to notice one thing that I had hardly noticed before: the brief silences, the rests, the gaps.

It occurred to me that I ought to read Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, which I had seen mentioned time and time again. Even so, I never took the time to pick it up and read it, until now.

I read his brief essay in one sitting before bed, and it made things fall into place that now seem obvious but I was unable to articulate in the past.

In brief, In Praise of Shadows is a non-fiction piece on aesthetics. Tanizaki approaches the subject through the lens of Japanese culture, and what separates it from the West. Throughout the text, he argues that Western society celebrates light, definition, and polish. Everything is visible, and that which is beautiful must be seen.

Tanizaki’s stance pushes back against the “Western” view, instead suggesting that the gaps are far more important than the thing in itself and the bulk of his attention falls on design. Take something like miso soup, for instance. On its face, and given a clear container, it has a cloudy-transparent, brothy color. It is neither unappetizing nor appetizing. But, change the conditions surrounding the dish—a dark container, a candlelit room in evening—and our affective relationship to it changes in its entirety.

He goes on to argue that a very large part of Japanese aesthetics take seriously that the condition in which they will be experienced is one of darkness. Widespread electrical lighting has transformed it, in the negative. While the “Westerner” changes conditions to match his or her aesthetics, the Japanese—like many other peoples—have changed their aesthetics to match conditions, and this has affected the “national character.” So, while the Westerner polishes silverware and other metal goods, the Japanese allow them to develop a patina as a sign of character.

While Tanizaki’s stark division of national classifications is something that I take to be incorrect, his praise of the “gaps” matches my own aesthetic taste. Like him—and more than ninety years after his piece was written—I think closely about electrical lighting and what it does. As far as I’m concerned, there is little worse than overhead, fluorescent lighting (he has an aside where he complains about neon lighting—I’m thankful he never had to see today’s lights!). In contrast, the finest-lit spaces are those with subtle touches of ambient lighting: properly placed lamps, warm tones, a refusal of total radiance. What makes ambient lighting so beautiful is—precisely—the shadows it produces.

Once I began to notice the quiet places, the pauses, the gaps, the rests, the empty spaces, I came to see that a great deal of what we call “design” is merely a way of framing that open space. Think about the room I’m sitting in right now. When I look around, I see walls, a desk, some cabinets, a bookshelf, a lamp, chairs, and a few other things. When I take a closer look, I see that the things I just mentioned are actually the exception. In fact, most of the space is filled by what appears to be “nothing.” And, when I take a third look, I see the shadows: the light coming through the window causes my stapler to develop a literal shadow; my east-facing wall, as I write this, has a large window, but it hardly gets any light at all. The patio door, on the west wall, is made of glass, and it receives light, pushing a shadow out from the refrigerator, and the skylight in the center of the kitchen adds more light.

The whole thing is beautiful because of its shadows.

What makes Tanizaki’s work especially powerful is that he approaches his topic through the senses: when he discusses sushi (salmon on persimmon leaves), I can’t help but taste its subtle flavors in my own mouth; when he describes blackened teeth or dark-green lipstick, I can see them too; when he discusses wood and paper, I feel my fingertips running along the texture.

While so many works run on abstraction, this one does not—it forces the reader to experience what he experiences.

This essay is less one to read than one to think with, and I suspect I’ll come back to it again and again.