“In medieval Japan,
poets and priests directed the Japanese
toward cherry blossoms, deformed pieces of pottery,
raked gravel, moss, rain falling on leaves,
autumn skies, roof tiles and unvarnished wood.
A word emerged, wabi,
of which no Western language, tellingly,
has a direct equivalent,
which identified beauty with unpretentious,
simple, unfinished, transient things.
There was wabi to be enjoyed
in an evening spent alone in a cottage
in the woods hearing the rain fall.”
– Alain de Botton,
The Architecture of Happiness, p.260