Dear Yamamoto Tsunetomo

The dead are a long time in the grave, a long time dead for sure, but dying sure can take its time. I take my father's arm as we walk slowly through the hospital gardens. He is a lumbering giant, an earthen colossus with tree branch arms and an iron rod for a walking stick. He is a strong man burdened with the weakness and frailty of age, a weight that I now, with my arm linked in his, help him to carry.

Yamamoto, you have a lot to say about the right way to die, but not so much about the best way to live in old age. Cicero's writing has been a great help, but he did not live to see his body leak and sag and betray his spirit. My father's body is betraying him, defying his will to live, his passion for new knowledge and new experiences. He tells me stories of his time as a soldier, weapons training done out in the bush with young men. He tells me of the summer he wrote poetry every hour of the day for weeks on end, and how he thought it was a portent of his rapidly impending death....but he has lived twenty years more since that season.

He is full of stories, his cup overflows with life and death and love and adventure and his over brimming eyes burst with the tears of his passion. For he has lived a life defined by the principles of nobility and honour and although he is a man as guilty as any other of sins and errors, as you rightly say, Yamamoto... “A man who has never once erred is dangerous.”

We sit together, my father and I, in the dimly lit comfort of the hospital resting lounge, awaiting the doctor. I have your book, the Hagakure, with me and I read to my father, anecdotes of the wisdom of your era. My father and I share this love of wisdom, and of heroic legends of kings and warriors and poets. We share the same love of immortality and chivalry, and we both endeavour to make real the fantasy of history, in the actions and thoughts of our own lives.

He talks to me about hunting, about the best way to make a clean, swift kill. The correct angle to pierce the shoulder of a beast and puncture the heart in one shot. My father is a skilled marksman, a prize-winning soldier on the rifle range and a hunter of many years experience in the dry mountains and plains of his homeland. A hunter of wild boar and wild goat. He is a student of technology also, and a teacher of sciences both metallurgic and silicone. A boilermaker and welder of great skill, as well as a computing lecturer and tutor. He is an author of books on industrial and domestic chemicals as well as on the history of submarine warfare and of folk legends surrounding weather prediction. A collector of books and coins and model trains and tanks and soldiers. A lover of culture and film and games and music and children and wisdom and good food and fine clothes and fine wine. A peasant king of the feasting table, a master of salads and meats and funny songs and rhymes.

In the kitchen my father always sings. In the mornings he sings to wake me up and in the evenings he sings as he serves up dinner. He is always ready to laugh at his own misfortune and pain, and despite his life long passion for learning, has always considered himself uneducated on account of never even really starting high school, instead entering the workforce at age thirteen. He is possessed of a self deprecating humility, mingled in equal parts with pride and a strong sense of his own worth. He has studied the natural sciences, ecology, ornithology, philosophy and history, but his true passion is film, and the actors who have for his entire life, inspired him with their dramatic portrayals of the never-ending diversity of human experience.

This white haired polymath, my Father, is making preparations for a great journey. The last one he will ever make. The last journey any of us will ever make.

“The person without previous resolution to inevitable death makes certain that his death will be in bad form.” Yamamoto, your wisdom is a heavy stone to carry, but the truth is often so. My father makes preparations that his death shall be in good form, without trembling or fear. “If you are slain in battle, one should resolve to have one's corpse facing the enemy.” My father prepares himself daily, facing the pain of his bodily decay with courage and good humour, ready to fall facing the enemy.

Yamamoto, I wish you could have met my Father. I think that over a bottle of Saki he would have opened up to you and revealed his Way. His Warrior Code. He is an Australian, so understand he is very different from you, but I believe that you both admire similar ideals and would have much to discuss. I will continue to read to him from your book when I can.

Perhaps Yamamoto, one day, I will read to you from my Father's books.

Today I carry water, and tomorrow I will chop wood. For as you say, “There is nothing more valuable than moments of life. All human life is a sequence of moments.”

Carry water, chop wood.

*

The Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo