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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: The Chinese, who put much less into a painting than what we deem
indispensable, delight in dramas that last six weeks.
To give a concluding touch of life to my necessarily skeleton-like
generalities, memory pictures me a certain painting of Okio's which
I fell in love with at first sight. It is of a sunrise on the coast
of Japan. A long line of surf is seen tumbling in to you from out a
bank of mist, just piercing which shows the blood-red disk of the
rising sun, while over the narrow strip of breaking rollers three
cranes are slowly sailing north. And that is all you see. You do
not see the shore; you do not see the main; you are looking but at
the border-land of that great unknown, the heaving ocean still
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