Posterity
In “Posterity,” Akutagawa Ryunosuke reflects on the artist's uneasy desire to survive in the minds of future readers. He doubts both the wisdom of the public and the existence of beauty that can transcend every time and culture. He even imagines his books forgotten, dust-covered, or eaten by bookworms. Yet beneath this skepticism remains a stubborn hope: perhaps, a hundred generations hence, one unknown reader will discover a few lines and dream because of them. The essay turns its own contradiction into its subject, regarding the longing for literary immortality with irony, tenderness, and compassion for a weakness shared by all humanity.
I am not one who intends to wait a hundred generations for a kindred spirit.
The judgment of the public is always liable to miss the mark. That this is true of the public today goes without saying. History teaches us how far even the citizens of Periclean Athens and Renaissance Florence fell short of an ideal public. If the public of today and yesterday has already been such as this, is there not every reason to infer what the judgment of tomorrow's public will be? I regret to say that I am compelled to doubt whether, even after a hundred generations, they will truly be able to distinguish gold from sand.
Even supposing an ideal public could exist, can there really be such a thing as absolute beauty in the world of art? The eyes with which I see today are only my eyes of today; they are by no means my eyes of tomorrow. At the same time, my eyes are ultimately Japanese eyes, not Western ones. How, then, could I believe in the existence of a beauty that transcends time and place? The fires of Dante's Inferno may perhaps still make a youth of the East shudder. Yet between those fires and ourselves, does not fourteenth-century Italy drift like a bank of cloud and mist?
Besides, I am merely an ordinary man of letters. Even if the judgment of posterity were unerring and universal beauty did exist, it is not for me to write works meant to be stored away on a famous mountain for future ages. It should be perfectly clear, without the need to ask, that I am not waiting a hundred generations for someone who understands me.
At times I imagine that twenty years from now, or fifty, or even a hundred, an age will come that knows nothing even of my existence. My collected works will then lie buried under a high mound of dust, waiting vainly for a reader in some corner of a secondhand bookshop shelf around Kanda. Or perhaps only one copy will remain in some library, pitifully devoured by bookworms and so tattered that even its letters can no longer be read. And yet—
And yet, I think.
Might not someone chance upon my collected works and read one short piece from them, or perhaps only a few lines from that piece? To indulge an even more presumptuous hope, might not that one piece, or those few lines, give some small measure of a beautiful dream to a future reader whom I shall never know?
I am not one who intends to wait a hundred generations for a kindred spirit. I therefore understand how completely this imagining of mine contradicts what I profess to believe.
Still, I continue to imagine it: in the desolate distance of a hundred generations, there will be one reader who takes my collected works in hand. And before that reader's mind, however dimly, a mirage of myself will rise.
I know there are wise and accomplished people who will laugh at my folly. Yet even I do not mean to be outdone by anyone when it comes to laughing at it. Only, as I laugh at my folly, I am bound to pity my own weakness—the weakness that still clings so fondly to that folly. Or perhaps I am bound to pity, together with myself, the same weakness in humankind at large.