Autumn and mono no aware: an emotion, or a trained way of seeing?
Its coordinates: 6.23 Philosophy of Emotion
The maples in the hills north of Osaka are only starting to turn, and I'm drawing autumn pages for a children's book. My editor wants "the feeling of autumn", and I keep reaching for mono no aware, which is usually translated as "the pathos of things" or "a sensitivity to the passing of things".
What I can't settle is what kind of thing it is.
If it's an emotion, it should be like sadness: it has an object, it comes and goes, you can be in it or out of it. But Motoori Norinaga, in his writing on The Tale of Genji, speaks of knowing mono no aware, as though it were a capacity you can have or lack, a kind of literacy of the heart. Someone who sees falling leaves and feels nothing hasn't missed an emotion so much as failed to read.
So is it an emotion, a skill, or a way of seeing that makes certain emotions possible? And is there anything like it in other traditions that isn't just "melancholy"? I need to draw it for six-year-olds, so I'd like to understand it first.