I WAS reading some of the wonderful and enduring memories that the Japanese thinker, Nishitani Keiji (1900-1990), shared about his Kyoto School predecessor, Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945). These concern the latter’s thoughts as he was seen to enter the final stages of his life. In 1927, when Professor Nishida (pictured) retired from his position at the university, he composed a simple verse to express how he felt about migrating from one phase of his existence to another:

Like the sun that sets over Mount Atago

To blaze red for the time that remains.

Some of Nishida’s biographers have misinterpreted these lines as a sign that he was steeling himself for a swift demise, but at the time he was still only fifty-seven years of age. What people often misunderstand about this evocative verse is the actual timescale of the metaphorical sunset in question, or perhaps even the absence of time itself. As Nishitani recalls, Nishida informed his young protégé that he wished to spend his twilight years writing and thus one might regard this period as more of a re-evaluation of context:

“The dedication of his entire life to creative activity was Nishida’s preparation for death. It was a lifestyle forged through long discipline, not easily come by.”

Death, from Nishida’s own perspective, was not simply impossible for others to comprehend in a purely temporal fashion, it also lay beyond the spatial realm in terms of the existential sunset being located within him and beyond him at the same time. To shatter the earthly parameters of death in this way certainly makes a refreshing change from the individual who, tired of life, might equate the onset of retirement with the sound made by the first shovelful of dirt as it lands on the lid of his coffin. Nishida, who was both ready to work and ready to die, would live for a further eighteen years.