The ancient Japanese poets who wrote haiku—we see them as remarkably serene, permanently lost in cheerful, carefree contemplation. But it could have been completely different, they might have been nervous, anxious, fearful, and, who knows, the moment when they composed the poem we read so many centuries later may have been the only moment of inspiration, calm, in the gallop of their difficult, dramatic lives.
— Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration
I know this feeling well. It’s a cognitive illusion. We see the eternal now of composition, the moment when the old masters composed their haiku, as a separate realm from the everyday worries about insects, famine, or conscription into the emperor’s army. Bashō’s days were maybe five percent jumping frogs and plum blossoms, and ninety-five percent cold floors and aching joints. But on the page, those five percent moments multiply. Time has stripped away the noise, the fears, the tax collectors, leaving only the cuckoo’s cry in Kyoto and the autumn wind on Mount Asama. The result is a mirage: we imagine the poet living permanently inside the mood of his best work, like a catchy melody looped on repeat.
Dante never really knew Beatrice. He saw her twice: once when she was a child, and he spoke to her once in passing on the street. Petrarch saw Laura, the wife of another man, once in church, and never met her again. The Vita Nuova, the Divine Comedy, the sonnets — they give us an airbrushed, filtered fantasy of love, not a reality show of unwashed dishes, dirty diapers, and silent evenings of bad moods while scrolling separate phones. Modern sophisticates like ourselves would call them obsessives, if not incels, and urge them to try a dating site. And yet, they used their personal fantasies to create enduring art for the world.
Chateaubriand, Byron, Shelley, Friedrich, and their heirs gave us the enduring archetype of the melancholy Romantic, gazing at ruins. Wandering through the syllables of a haiku anthology like aristocrats on a Grand Tour of literature, we admire the preserved remnants of Buson, Bashō, and Issa’s lives, much as we might admire the last standing arch of a cathedral without seeing the peasants who hauled the stone or the sieges that brought it down. We romanticize the old poets in the same way Dante and Petrarch romanticized their muses — mistaking a moment for a life. We use the world’s great art to create ephemeral fantasies for ourselves.