By Pierre Loti
Ah! the natural perversity of inanimate
things
Contemptuous pity, both for my suspicions
and the cause of them
Dull hours spent in idle and diffuse
conversation
Efforts to arrange matters we succeed
often only in disarranging
Found nothing that answered to my
indefinable expectations
Habit turns into a makeshift of attachment
I know not what lost home that I have
failed to find
Irritating laugh which is peculiar to
Japan
Japanese habit of expressing myself
with excessive politeness
Ordinary, trivial, every-day objects
Prayers swallowed like pills by
invalids at a distance
Seeking for a change which can no
longer be found
Trees, dwarfed by a Japanese process
When the inattentive spirits are not
listening
Which I should find amusing in any
one else, - any one I loved