Today is Kodomo - Children’s Day - the last of Golden Week’s four holidays. I’m thinking first and foremost of my children and my grandchildren, as Pa is of his.
But being in Beppu, we’re thinking of those close at hand as well.
The best friends,
the kids on bikes,
the brother and sisters,
soccer players,
and baseball players.
And, especially,
those just learning to play.
Walt Whitman never had a child or children, at least none that ever stepped forth, but having been one,
he knew something of them:
There was a child went forth every day, and the first object he looked upon
and received with wonder
or pity or love or dread,
that object he became, and that object became part of him
for the day or a certain part of the day,
or for many years
or stretching cycles of years . . .
I don’t know if the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer
ever had children,
but he knew something of the importance of parenting,
having been parented himself:
The experiences and illuminations of childhood and early youth become in later life the types, standards and patterns of all subsequent knowledge and experience - the categories according to which all later things are classified - though not always consciously. And so in our childhood years the foundation is laid of our later view of the world. There, with its superficiality or depth, it will unfold and be fulfilled, though not essentially changed.
Whitman had a difficult father.
Though he wrote little of his father, on occasion he alluded to him:
The strata of colored clouds,
the horizon's edge,
the flying seacrow,
the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud;
These became part of that child who went forth every day,
and who now goes
and will always go forth every day. And these become of him or her
that peruses them now.
And so they’re celebrating Children’s Day
here in Beppu,
and throughout Japan.
This Day, it seems, should be the equal of Earth Day
and celebrated Everywhere.
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