Afterword

We have walked a long road together, from the year 1900 to the year 1944. Along the way we met fifty-seven people who lived in very different places and very different lives. Some of them had money and fame; some had almost nothing. Some lived long and wrote their best words in old age; some died young, and their words were found only later, in a notebook or a drawer. Yet when we hold their words side by side, they seem to be talking to one another across the oceans and the years.

Again and again, they said a few simple things. Live in the day you have, not only in the one you are waiting for. Be kind, and pay real attention to the person in front of you. Do your own work with love, even when nobody praises it. Keep walking, because the road is made by walking. Stay open to change, at twenty and at eighty. And do not lose faith in other people, even when the times are dark. None of these ideas is new. The echoes in every chapter showed us that teachers thousands of years earlier, and traditional sayings with no known author, said much the same. That is not a weakness of these words. It is their strength.

Many of the people in this book wrote in hard years: during wars, in prison, in sickbeds, in poverty or in hiding. It would have been easy for them to write only about pain. Instead, they wrote about joy, courage, friendship and hope. Their hope was not a way of looking away from trouble. It was a decision about how to live in the middle of it. I think this is the brightest light the book has to offer: if they could keep such hope in their times, we can try to keep it in ours.

You do not need to remember all fifty-seven sayings. Perhaps one or two have stayed with you already. Write them down somewhere you will see them, say them to someone you love, or carry them with you on an ordinary day. A saying becomes truly yours not when you can repeat it, but when you have lived it a little. I hope these lights will be with you for a long stretch of your own road.

The People in This Book

Here are the speakers of the fifty-seven chapters in the order of the book, with the years of their lives, the language in which they wrote and the number of the chapter. Where a person wrote in more than one language, the main ones are named.

The first decade of the century: Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933, English and Japanese, chapter 1), Booker T. Washington (1856–1915, English, chapter 2), Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902, Japanese, chapter 3), Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950, Tamil, chapter 4), Edith Wharton (1862–1937, English, chapter 5), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926, German, chapter 6), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910, Russian, chapter 7), Franz Kafka (1883–1924, German, chapter 8), Rubén Darío (1867–1916, Spanish, chapter 9), Okakura Kakuzō (1863–1913, English and Japanese, chapter 10), Romain Rolland (1866–1944, French, chapter 11), Henri Bergson (1859–1941, French, chapter 12), G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936, English, chapter 13), L. M. Montgomery (1874–1942, English, chapter 14), Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949, French, chapter 15) and José Enrique Rodó (1871–1917, Spanish, chapter 16).

The second decade: Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912, Japanese, chapter 17), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919, English, chapter 18), C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933, Greek, chapter 19), Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924, English, chapter 20), Antonio Machado (1875–1939, Spanish, chapter 21), Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941, Russian, chapter 22), José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955, Spanish, chapter 23), Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916, Japanese, chapter 24), Edith Cavell (1865–1915, English, chapter 25), Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919, German and Polish, chapter 26) and Amado Nervo (1870–1919, Spanish, chapter 27).

The 1920s: Lu Xun (1881–1936, Chinese, chapter 28), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951, German, chapter 29), Zhu Ziqing (1898–1948, Chinese, chapter 30), Yosano Akiko (1878–1942, Japanese, chapter 31), Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931, Arabic and English, chapter 32), Marie Curie (1867–1934, French and Polish, chapter 33), Marcel Proust (1871–1922, French, chapter 34), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927, Japanese, chapter 35), J. E. K. Aggrey (1875–1927, English, chapter 36), Ahmed Shawqi (1868–1932, Arabic, chapter 37), Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948, Gujarati and English, chapter 38), Kaneko Misuzu (1903–1930, Japanese, chapter 39), Han Yong-un (1879–1944, Korean, chapter 40), Max Ehrmann (1872–1945, English, chapter 41), Amelia Earhart (1897–1937, English, chapter 42) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941, English, chapter 43).

The 1930s and the early 1940s: Albert Einstein (1879–1955, German, chapter 44), Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933, Japanese, chapter 45), Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935, Portuguese, chapter 46), Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi (1909–1934, Arabic, chapter 47), Lin Huiyin (1904–1955, Chinese, chapter 48), Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938, Urdu and Persian, chapter 49), W. B. Yeats (1865–1939, English, chapter 50), Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941, Bengali and English, chapter 51), Yun Dong-ju (1917–1945, Korean, chapter 52), Simone Weil (1909–1943, French, chapter 53), Etty Hillesum (1914–1943, Dutch, chapter 54), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945, German, chapter 55), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944, French, chapter 56) and Anne Frank (1929–1945, Dutch, chapter 57).

For Readers and Reading Groups

This book can be read alone, but it also works well with others: with a friend, in a family, in a class or in a reading group. One simple way is to choose one chapter for each meeting. One person reads the saying aloud, and everyone says first what it means to them before talking about the life behind it. Then the group can read the echoes and ask whether the old words and the new words really say the same thing, or something slightly different.

Another way is to follow the book through time. Read the chapters of one decade together, and notice how the world around the speakers changed: new machines and new cities at the start of the century, a great war in the 1910s, new freedoms and new troubles in the 1920s, and then the dark years of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Ask how each person's time shaped their words, and which words seem to belong to every time.

Here are some questions that may help. Which saying in this book did you like at once, and which one did you resist at first? Is there a saying that you think you will understand better in ten or twenty years? Which echo from another part of the world surprised you most? Whose life would you like to know more about? If you could add one sentence of your own to this road of lights, what would it be?

Some readers like to keep a small notebook while reading. On each page they copy one saying, write down one echo they know from their own family or language, and add one thing they did that day because of the saying. After some months, such a notebook becomes a quiet record of a life lived a little more thoughtfully.

About the Words in This Book

Every main saying in this book comes from a person who died long ago, and every one is given with its work, letter, speech or poem and its year. Where the exact year is not known, as with the poems of Amado Nervo, Kaneko Misuzu, Ahmed Shawqi and Amelia Earhart, and the sayings of J. E. K. Aggrey, the chapter gives the time as closely as it can, and stands where the speaker's life places it.

Words that were not first written in English are given in my own paraphrase, not in any published translation. Where a person wrote in English, a short line sometimes appears in their own wording. The echoes come from old texts and from traditional sayings, and they too are paraphrased, with the name of the work and, where one exists, the number of the section.

In a few chapters, the famous short form of a saying is not quite what the person wrote: Marcel Proust's "new eyes", Albert Einstein's bicycle and the history of Max Ehrmann's Desiderata. The chapters tell the real story. When you meet a famous saying elsewhere, it is always worth asking where it comes from. Very often, the true words are even richer than the poster.

This book shares sayings and the stories of the people who wrote them, read in the light of everyday life. It is not a scholarly study of these writers, and many of their works are much larger than the few lines given here. If one of these voices has spoken to you, the best next step is simple: find the book, the letters or the poems, and read more.