This strange little book (less than 80 pages) would seem to be a must-read for anyone in a design field, especially interior design. First heard mention of it from Tony Fadell on this excellent Tim Ferris interview. I have a couple of copies of the book ready to share with my girls. Here's the time point in the Fadell podcast:
(We share our impressions of a little-known (and very short) book called In Praise of Shadows — and Tony explains why he gifts it so often. [1:41:41])
Now it pops up again in this New York Times opinion piece: What We Get Wrong About Minimalism
"So often minimalism portends to be permanent, a fixed end state, instead of flux and change. Minimalism is a process that has to be kept up and refreshed day to day. I’m always inspired by this quote from a 1933 essay called “In Praise of Shadows,” by the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki: “We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.”Lastly, this paragraph in the NY Times article connects well to Sunday's Nugget and the article Charlie sent from The Atlantic. See corpse meditation, and how not to make the mistake of trying to maintain peak performance indefinitely. A little weird, to say the least (no pun intended) but makes a great point!
"My ideal concept comes from Japan, which has developed its philosophy of absence for more than a millennium, via Japanese Buddhism. “Mono-no-aware” is a term that means something like “the beauty of things passing”; it can be found in thousand-year-old texts like Murasaki Shikibu’s “The Tale of Genji,” in which characters take particular pleasure in everything that is transient: blooming flowers, decrepit wooden mansions, fire embers on a cold night."
