10th-century blog

Small children and babies ought to be plump. So ought provincial governors and others who have gone ahead in the world; for if they are lean and dessicated, one suspects them of being ill-tempered.

My favorite blog was written in the last decade of the 10th century in Japan. Of course it’s not technically a blog, but The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon offers everything one seeks in the perfect 3-minute read: literary elegance, personal opinion, cultural insight. I am still reading it years later because I don’t want to reach the end. I’ve read 118 of 185 sections.

Sei Shonagon was a lady-in-waiting for Empress Sadako, who died in 1000. One day she takes charge of a number of surplus notebooks delivered to the Empress and decides to “make a pillow of them.” She starts writing her book – a collection of varied observations, opinions, and stories of life at court. In this period the Japanese upper classes often kept a “pillow book” by their bed to record random notes, but Shonagon’s writings turn out to be the most prized and historically significant writings that survive from this period.

Shonagon delights in making lists of things: different ways of speaking; hateful things; things that makes one’s heart beat faster; things that arouse a strong memory of the past; unsuitable things; squalid things; adorable things; things that give a clean feeling. Her lists reveal what I love about her: she’s opinionated, snobbish, and has an incredible sense of social propriety. She is also smart, passionate, and has a refined sense of beauty.

Here she proposes Unsuitable Things:

A woman with ugly hair wearing a robe of white damask.
Hollyhock worn in frizzled hair.
Ugly handwriting on red paper.
Snow on the houses of common people. This is especially regrettable when the moonlight shines down on it.
…A woman, who though well past her youth, is pregnant and walks along panting. It is unpleasant to see a woman of a certain age with a young husband; and it is most unsuitable when she becomes jealous of him because he has gone to visit someone else.

I wish I could post a comment to her blog: Yes, I quite agree, there’s really no point wearing white damask if you don’t get your hair done. WHAT A WASTE. I have quite a good hairdresser to recommend to your friend. As for the frizzled hair, a hollyhock will only accentuate the ugliness…WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?!?!?

Shonagon is probably unusual among her peers in that she is not intimidated intellectually or sexually by the parade of aristocrats and bureaucrats that she meets. She has numerous lovers, encounters with whom inform many writings. As we near the end of July, it’s worth noting that:

To meet one’s lover summer is indeed the right season. True, the nights are very short and dawn creeps up before one has had a wink of sleep. Since all the lattices have been left open, one can lie and look out at the garden in the cool morning air.

I think I’m living in the wrong century.

2 responses to “10th-century blog”

  1. Lane says:

    I think I’m living in the wrong century

    oh Stella we’ve all known this about you for years.

  2. […] Earlier this year, I shared my love of Sei Shonagon and her pillow book in “10th century blog”. Her writing bursts with the best lists. As one who scores a strong J on the Myers-Briggs test, I can’t help but start with a list of disappointing things. […]