An Unexpected Answer

The way each person evaluates worth is really fascinating.

In my youth, when I was mad about ceramics, I made many masks of clay that exaggerated and deformed people’s joy, anger, sorrow, and delight in their facial expressions. When I showed those masks to a dentist friend, he answered, “This face is distorted. Probably the left back tooth has come out and the jaw is warped to the right—that’s how the face looks.”

Later, once I’d entered the world of flowers, when I gave a certain botany teacher a flower arrangement, he offered his impression: “With this many reproductive organs packed so densely, even the insects would be at a loss which flower to choose.” At such unexpected replies I’ve been left dumbfounded any number of times.

But these replies are by no means mistaken—they gave their impressions from a specialist’s standpoint; it’s only that they differ from the impression I’d been expecting.

If you interpret various ways of thinking positively, they may be the finest, respect-worthy answers—cultivating sensibility and knowledge, and leading to new imagination.