A mere two nights after quoting Niccolò Machiavelli's reflections on his ancient friends, I came upon a similar passage in Essays in Idleness, written by the Japanese poet-monk Yoshida Kenkō around the year 1330. Here's what Kenkō had to say, in the translation by Donald Keene:
The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known. The books I would choose are the moving volumes of Wen Hsüan, the collected works of Po Chü-i, the sayings of Lao Tzu, and the chapters of Chuang Tzu.
Whereas Machiavelli conversed with ancient Greek and Roman historians like Polybius and Livy, Kenkō befriended Chinese poets and Taoist philosophers. Much as I enjoy history, I give the nod to Kenkō because his preferences align more closely with mine. As Aristotle said in Chapter IX of the Poetics: "Poetry is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular."
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
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