The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Matsuo Bashō (1689)

The months and days are travellers of eternity, Bashō writes, and the years too are wayfarers, and then he sells his hut, packs almost nothing, and walks out of Edo to prove it. What follows is a five-month journey on foot into the deep north of Japan, set down as haibun: passages of prose that reach for a place, broken open by a single haiku that holds it still. At Hiraizumi he stands in the grass where a great clan ruled and was annihilated, and instead of mourning them he gives us summer grasses and the dreams of dead soldiers, three lines carrying more grief than any chronicle. The pleasures are small and exact, a moon over pines, the islands of Matsushima, weeks of rain on a mountain road. _The Narrow Road to the Deep North_ is one of the shortest masterworks ever made, and that is its claim: attend to the passing world closely enough, and the attention is what lasts.