2008 Woodie Awards
Guest column: The delicate beauty of blossoms
In anticipation of the Cherry Blossom Festival
Abhi Chandrasekhara
Issue date: 3/25/08 Section: Opinion
Nothing captures the evanescence of existence quite as well as A.E. Housman's eternally relevant poem:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Spring, our regular reminder of renewal and rebirth, as well as of our tireless march to the great beyond, is upon us. So, too, is the National Cherry Blossom Festival. Few have the opportunity to remark at such a spectacle as we. And our brethren from across the land swarm the capital, like ants converging upon a melted popsicle, to join us in awe.
Tokyo mayor Yukio Ozaki gave the first trees to our nation in 1912. The Japanese cherish their cherry blossoms as a mark of the changing of seasons and years. Televised news broadcasts there include a "bloom watch," where, along with forecasting the weather, meteorologists track the blossoming of the trees in places throughout the island nation. A folk song, "Sakura," has been popular for hundreds of years since it was composed in Japan's feudal Edo Period.
The first cherry blossom festival here was held in 1935 and has emerged from its earliest roots as a solemn ceremony commemorating the arrival of spring to become an accessible event with many attractions.
The cultural street festival boasts the title of the largest Japanese street party in the nation and showcases a range of sights from the serenity of Zen gardens to the intensity of Japanese martial arts.
If the excitation of intellectual faculties isn't enough, the food and drink are also sublime. Everyone knows about sushi. Many know about the crisp, delicious lagers such as Sapporo and Kirin Ichiban. But few know of other cultural delights, such as arare (fried sweet rice coated in soy sauce), tako (no tortillas here - in Japan, tako is octopus) or the light desserts of mochi and manju.
Aside from the bragging rights that go along with eating the exotic delicacies of people half a world away, festivals like these allow us to get a taste of a way of life distinct from our own. At our university where we tout our diversity, discussion rarely moves beyond a politically correct embrace of people who don't look like us. But immersion in a different culture offers us not only the opportunity to experience things that are very unfamiliar - it also offers a vantage point from which to examine the biases and assumptions of our own culture.
The 20th century saw the Japanese westernize at an unprecedented rate, but somehow, along with their aspirations to achieve the technological dominance of our culture, they were able to retain an almost pious reverence for nature. Their appreciation is not good merely because nature is undeniably beautiful, but also because nature's beauty is unmistakably fleeting.
This lesson is lost on so many in the concrete jungles of our cities where we, abiding by our modernist aesthetic, attempt to create things of permanence. Especially here in Washington, our beautiful city of alabaster, home to our marble and granite monuments to our presidents as well as memorials for the heroes from wars spanning our nation's history, we must remember none of this is permanent - not our lives, not our country and not our civilization.
So as Housman's poem reminds us: Realize the finitude of existence. Visit the Tidal Basin. See the blossoms, the festivities, the people. Live this spring as if it were your last.
Abhi Chandrasekhara is a junior finance major. He can be reached at abhijnya@umd.edu.
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Spring, our regular reminder of renewal and rebirth, as well as of our tireless march to the great beyond, is upon us. So, too, is the National Cherry Blossom Festival. Few have the opportunity to remark at such a spectacle as we. And our brethren from across the land swarm the capital, like ants converging upon a melted popsicle, to join us in awe.
Tokyo mayor Yukio Ozaki gave the first trees to our nation in 1912. The Japanese cherish their cherry blossoms as a mark of the changing of seasons and years. Televised news broadcasts there include a "bloom watch," where, along with forecasting the weather, meteorologists track the blossoming of the trees in places throughout the island nation. A folk song, "Sakura," has been popular for hundreds of years since it was composed in Japan's feudal Edo Period.
The first cherry blossom festival here was held in 1935 and has emerged from its earliest roots as a solemn ceremony commemorating the arrival of spring to become an accessible event with many attractions.
The cultural street festival boasts the title of the largest Japanese street party in the nation and showcases a range of sights from the serenity of Zen gardens to the intensity of Japanese martial arts.
If the excitation of intellectual faculties isn't enough, the food and drink are also sublime. Everyone knows about sushi. Many know about the crisp, delicious lagers such as Sapporo and Kirin Ichiban. But few know of other cultural delights, such as arare (fried sweet rice coated in soy sauce), tako (no tortillas here - in Japan, tako is octopus) or the light desserts of mochi and manju.
Aside from the bragging rights that go along with eating the exotic delicacies of people half a world away, festivals like these allow us to get a taste of a way of life distinct from our own. At our university where we tout our diversity, discussion rarely moves beyond a politically correct embrace of people who don't look like us. But immersion in a different culture offers us not only the opportunity to experience things that are very unfamiliar - it also offers a vantage point from which to examine the biases and assumptions of our own culture.
The 20th century saw the Japanese westernize at an unprecedented rate, but somehow, along with their aspirations to achieve the technological dominance of our culture, they were able to retain an almost pious reverence for nature. Their appreciation is not good merely because nature is undeniably beautiful, but also because nature's beauty is unmistakably fleeting.
This lesson is lost on so many in the concrete jungles of our cities where we, abiding by our modernist aesthetic, attempt to create things of permanence. Especially here in Washington, our beautiful city of alabaster, home to our marble and granite monuments to our presidents as well as memorials for the heroes from wars spanning our nation's history, we must remember none of this is permanent - not our lives, not our country and not our civilization.
So as Housman's poem reminds us: Realize the finitude of existence. Visit the Tidal Basin. See the blossoms, the festivities, the people. Live this spring as if it were your last.
Abhi Chandrasekhara is a junior finance major. He can be reached at abhijnya@umd.edu.
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