“Japanese emotions do not express themselves in words; they rarely reveal themselves even in tone of voice – they manifest above all in acts of exquisite courtesy and kindness.”

— Lafcadio Hearn, Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan

As for many people of our generation, for me, Japan began in early childhood with anime (first Polonia 1, then Dragon Ball and Studio Ghibli) and video games. Yet my first encounter beyond the sphere of pop culture was Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn—a book full of dark, mysterious ghost stories, profoundly Japanese, initially rather alien, but fascinating. Today I know it was not just a book about ghosts.

The author of this work was a man who long searched for a place for himself in the world. Lafcadio Hearn—son of a Greek woman and an Irishman. Abandoned by his mother at the age of four, and by his father at seven, little Lafcadio grew up under the care of a stern great-grandmother and aunts. His world was filled with silence, fear, and books. In his teenage years, an accident left him blind in his left eye, and the strain caused the other to grotesquely protrude outward. This disability made him even more alienated. He lived among shadows—both literally and metaphorically. He found no place for himself anywhere in Europe—he left penniless for America and became a reporter. He didn’t write about cultural events, politics, or celebrities—his articles dealt with the broken, the filthy, the marginalized—he wrote about prostitutes, gravediggers, and the insane. Lonely, poor, strange—as if he had always been preparing to live in a world of spirits.

When Lafcadio Hearn set foot on Japanese soil in 1890, he had already lived several lives. He knew the pain of rejection, the scent of dead bodies, the bitter reality of New Orleans, and the humiliations of being a nameless immigrant. And yet Japan—unknown, enigmatic, peculiar—struck him like the fragrance of a flower one knows from childhood, though never seen. His first day in the East—as he later titled his recollection—was not only a geographical transition but an existential one. He arrived in Yokohama a man who had ceased to believe in a place for himself in the world. And yet... something in him trembled. Let us take a closer look…

A child of alienation and spiritual sensitivity

The life of Lafcadio Hearn began on the border of continents and cultures—he was born on the Greek island of Leukas (Lefkada), the child of an Irishman and a Greek woman. This seemingly exotic beginning did not herald a fairytale childhood. On the contrary—from his earliest years he experienced deep loneliness and abandonment. Deserted by his mother at age four, seeing his father only sporadically—whom he never again encountered after his seventh year—young Lafcadio grew up under the care of a stern great-grandmother and aunts. His world was filled with silence, fear, and books. In his teenage years, an accident left him blind in his left eye, and the strain caused the other to grotesquely bulge outward. This disability made him even more alienated—but perhaps also deepened his unique perception of the world.

It was in that silence and solitude that his extraordinary spiritual sensitivity was born—emerging from the collision of physical pain, lack of closeness, and the coldness of Western European upbringing. His key source of solace became Greek myths—collections of tales and stories about heroes, nymphs, and capricious gods that he discovered in his great-grandmother’s library. Ancient mythology became not only a refuge for Hearn, but also a spiritual homeland—in it he found a harmony of sensuality, beauty, and mystery that forever shaped his aesthetics. This is why, as an adult, he so easily recognized in Japan the echo of ancient Hellas—a world full of gods, spirits, and subtle beauty woven into everyday life.

But Hearn’s childhood was not solely a contemplation of beauty—it was also the time when his obsession with death, horror, and the supernatural was born. Night terrors, visions of ghosts that haunted him as a child, and a harsh upbringing led to the connection between the world of the living and the dead becoming one of the most important themes of his work. As he later wrote, he feared ghosts more than beatings—because he could see them.

In adult life, Hearn developed his own philosophy of the soul, based on Buddhist and evolutionary influences, in which memory played a key role—not personal memory, but transgenerational consciousness. Under the influence of Herbert Spencer, he began to view the individual as composed of trillions of cells in which memories of past lives are stored. This view, which he termed “organic memory,” held that our thoughts, feelings, and reactions are echoes of the experiences of previous generations, encoded in our biological structure (a distant echo of a variation on this theme can be found here: "Parasite Eve" – Mitochondrial Eve in a Japanese Tale of Bodily Rebellion). According to Hearn, the “soul” is not something fixed—it is rather a dynamic network of ancestors, spirits, and impulses from centuries past, which momentarily congeals in our bodies only to later dissolve and take a new form. In this sense, even as a child, Hearn did not merely live in a world of spirits—he was their contemporary link, a being woven from countless fragments of prior existences.

American wandering and literary initiation – learning to see the margins

Before Lafcadio Hearn became a Japanese spirit in the body of a European vagabond, he was a poor, lonely newcomer in the New World—with no money, no plan, but an unquenchable hunger for everything that was different, strange, unfamiliar. He was like a poet cast onto the streets—with one eye, a shredded childhood, and a soul scorched by too-early encounters with life’s ugliness. In New Orleans and Cincinnati—two dirty, pulsing cities of nineteenth-century America—his great initiation began.

It was there that Hearn became something more than just a homeless intellectual—he became a writer. Or rather: someone who, through writing, slowly ceased to die. Working as a reporter, he did not write about the grand and prestigious. He had no interest in palaces or politicians. He descended into sewers, alleys, gutters—he spoke with gravediggers, prostitutes, butchers, vagrants, and spiritualists. He was present at executions, described the decomposition of corpses, entered dives and madhouses. He sought, touched, absorbed. Not with disgust—but with fascination. Like a romantic gazing into the abyss and saying: “here lies true beauty.”

It was then that his obsession with horror, death, and melancholy was born. That was when he learned that the deepest stirrings of the heart awaken not in daylight, but in the glow of candles on a night cemetery. And that only those who have suffered can speak the truth about the world. Hearn did not beautify reality—but neither did he avert his eyes from it. His descriptions are intensely sensual. He could write about the sound of shattering glass as another might write about Chopin.

For Hearn, writing became a form of therapy—perhaps even of religion. He was a romantic who found his temples in slaughterhouses and his prophets in funeral homes. In letters to friends, he wrote that he had devoted himself to the “religion of exoticism”—to all that was other, mismatched, rejected. Yet exoticism did not mean travel across the world, but journeys into what society pushed to the margins. It was there—in the grotesque, in deformation, in the whispers of the mad—that he heard the true melody of existence.

It is no wonder that his writing style from the outset struck deeper than mere reportage. He did not describe—he touched his subject. Language was for him an extension of the skin. Every word had to have temperature, color, scent. Every metaphor had to lead not only to understanding but to feeling. His essays resembled liturgies, his letters—fragments of an inner diary of the soul. He wrote:

“Words have faces, gestures, manners. Sometimes they are unreadable, but that doesn’t matter. Their shadows are more beautiful than their meanings.”

(The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, Vol. II)

Thus was born the Hearn we remember—not as a correspondent, but as a poet of the invisible. Through language, through exclusion, and through attentiveness to what is overlooked, he was unknowingly preparing for his most important encounter—with Japan. For even before he set foot in Yokohama, he was already ready—not as a tourist, but as a restless yet curious spirit.

Japan as solace and revelation – the beginning of a new life

When Lafcadio Hearn set foot on Japanese soil in 1890, he had already lived several lives. He knew the pain of rejection, the scent of dead bodies, the bitter reality of New Orleans, and the humiliations of a nameless immigrant. And yet Japan—unknown, enigmatic, peculiar—struck him like the scent of a flower one remembers from childhood, though never seen. The First Day in the East—as he would later title his recollection—was for him not merely a geographical passage, but an existential one. He arrived in Yokohama as a man who had ceased to believe there was a place for him in the world. And yet… something within him instantly trembled.

He began with a journey to Matsue—a small town on the shores of Lake Shinji, where time passed more slowly and people greeted one another with gentle smiles. It was there that he experienced his “honeymoon with Japan,” as he later called it. He was enchanted by the silence, the simplicity of life, the aesthetics of every rice bowl and each step of a geisha on the veranda planks. As he wrote: “This is not a country—it is a dream not yet awakened.”

It was also there that he met Setsu, the daughter of a samurai—a quiet, faithful woman who did not speak English. Their love was like a conversation between two souls that needed no translation. He married her and took her surname—Koizumi. The Japanese first name he chose—Yakumo, or “Eight Clouds”—came from mythological poetry in the Kojiki, and symbolized mystery and protection. This gesture—taking her name, her lineage, her language—was not merely a formality. It was a spiritual decision: “I could not be a Greek, I could not be an Irishman, I was not fully American—but I could be Japanese. At least, that’s how I felt” (also from his letters).

Hearn was not blind to Japan’s darker sides. But what he saw and loved was not exoticism. It was the everyday: the courtesy of a tea vendor, the care in wrapping purchases, the grace of students bowed over their calligraphy. Japan, in his eyes, was not a land of curiosities—but a community built on the discipline of the heart. “Every child here knows it does not exist for itself,” he wrote. “It lives for others: for ancestors, for family, for the emperor, for society.”

He looked at the Japanese not as a colonizer or tourist, but as a pilgrim. And he saw something the West—according to him—had long since forsaken: the spiritual depth of simplicity. Courtesy was not a form but a value. Cleanliness—not an obsession, but a ritual. Art—not a luxury, but air.

All this awakened in him the echo of another land—Greece. But not the Greece of the nineteenth century. The Greece he carried in his heart as a child abandoned by his father, nourished on tales of nymphs and demigods. Japan was for him a “living Greece”: a society where gods reside in trees and rivers, and ancestors keep watch from the household altar. “It is Greece a thousand years ago—with gods who need not be feared, but may be loved,” he wrote in delight.

Through Hearn, we learn to see Japan not through the prism of exoticism, but through authentic experience. We learn that a country is not just language, architecture, and cuisine—but the way people walk, breathe, and smile. Hearn taught us that Japan is not a place, but a state of being.

The aesthetics of old Japan – beauty that teaches

Lafcadio Hearn did not come to Japan as an ethnographer or adventurer. He came as a wandering spirit who had spent his life waiting for a place where the everyday could possess the value of poetry. And it was precisely that Japan he discovered—a Japan where each day was a ritual, each act a form of art, and each object a vessel of spirit.

In his eyes, the life of ordinary people was a form of art more refined than anything he had seen in the West. A woman washing vegetables in a stream with the grace of a tea ceremony. An old man placing incense before a portrait of his deceased wife—as if silently conversing with another world. A paper parasol whose shadow fell upon a wall in a way that could never be planned—yet was perfect.

Hearn saw in this an echo of a world Europe had long since disavowed—a world of harmony, restraint, and subtlety. “Japan teaches me—not through grand ideas, but through the delicate touch of daily gestures,” he wrote. His wonder grew in contrast to memories of industrial America—the noise, filth, machines, the brutality of everyday haste. The West, in his view, had gone mad with efficiency, casting beauty into the trash heap of history.

Meanwhile in Japan, rei—courtesy—was not merely a bow, but a philosophy. Silence did not signify emptiness, but a profound recognition of another’s presence. Hearn described it as a mysticism of form, where each gesture carried meaning. Thus was born his understanding of the Japanese spirit—the spirit of mono no aware, the ephemeral sorrow of impermanence that renders things more beautiful because they do not last.

Alongside this walked another concept: shibui—the taste of simplicity, of austere elegance that needs no adornment to be awe-inspiring. “What is quiet is stronger than what shouts,” he wrote, fascinated by homes of unplaned wood, tea without sugar, haiku poetry that contained a universe in three lines. All of it appeared to him as an aesthetic revelation: instead of adding—subtracting. Instead of shouting—whispering. Instead of dominating—coexisting.

But Hearn did not merely describe—he listened to language. He was in love with Japanese words the way a poet falls in love—not just with their meaning, but with their shadow, melody, story. In letters to Chamberlain, he explained that for him, words had “faces, manners, gestures… Sometimes they are unreadable, but it does not matter. Their shadows are more beautiful than their meanings.” For Hearn, the Japanese language was a translucent fabric through which something more could be glimpsed—the spirit of a nation.

He was enchanted by words such as:

– omotenashi – hospitality that expects nothing in return, based on anticipating the needs of the guest before they are spoken;
– natsukashii – a nostalgic longing for something past, but warm, serene;
– komorebi – sunlight filtering through leaves (more on that here: 10 Japanese Proverbs – Inspirations and Lessons Hidden in Ages-Old Characters);
– wabi and sabi – imperfection, solitude, silence, time – interwoven like moss on stone (more on that here: How to Stop Fighting Yourself at Every Turn? Wabi Sabi Is Not Interior Design but a Way of Life).

Each of these words was for him like a living fragment of Japan—impossible to fully translate, but possible to feel, like the scent of rain or the warmth of a hand. Language, in his view, was a temple in which the most tender aspects of a people’s soul were kept.

And thus, step by step, day by day, Hearn built not only his home in Japan – but also our understanding of its culture. Through his eyes, through his senses, through his writer’s soul, we learn that aesthetics in Japan is not an embellishment of life – it is its foundation.

Shinto and Buddhism through the Eyes of a Romantic

For Lafcadio Hearn, Japan was not only a visible place, with trees adorned with plum blossoms and buildings with astonishingly simple interiors – it was also an invisible country, woven from spirits, memories, and impulses beyond ordinary perception. It was a reality in which the past still spoke – and was listened to.

Hearn, a romantic to his very core, did not seek dogmas so much as felt truths. That is why his spiritual immersion in the religions of Japan had nothing to do with a systematic attempt to understand their doctrines. Instead, he read them like poetry – he felt, experienced, and described them.

On his path, he discovered two great ways: Shinto and Buddhism. To Hearn, these were not mutually exclusive systems, but two breaths of the same culture – one rooted in the earth, the other in infinity.

Shinto – the primal cult of Japan – spoke to him through gestures, through the smoke of incense rising in the shrine, through sacred trees bound with shimenawa rope (more about them here: A Profound Bond Between Humans and Trees in Japanese Culture and Ukiyo-e Art); through the mirror on the altar that did not reflect the face, but the soul. In it, Hearn saw something lacking in his own rationalized world – a living bond between humans and their ancestors, between community and nature. He wrote:

“In Shinto, as in the beliefs of the ancient Greeks, death did not mean an end, but a passage into a realm from which the ancestors could still influence the living – bless or punish, watch and remember.”

On this spiritual map, there were three circles of ancestor worship – the household, where the butsudan altar became a place of daily dialogue with the dead; the communal, where local deities – ujigami – were the souls of founders and guardians of a given village; and the imperial, in which the entire nation turned to Amaterasu, the divine ancestress of the ruling family.

Hearn understood this structure as more than religion. It was social fabric. It was spirits who bound people more than law, more than politics. Japanese society was not a collection of individuals – it was a mosaic of memory, ritual, and gratitude toward the dead.

But there was also Buddhism – subtle, melancholic, devoid of a creator god, open to uncertainty and emptiness. Here, Hearn felt at home. Having rejected Catholic dogma and Western individualism, he found in Buddhist teachings an explanation for his own obsessions – the fragility of existence, the illusion of the “self,” the endless cycle of reincarnations. In Buddhism, as in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, he saw the idea that the individual is a temporary cluster of cells and memories, which will disperse only to be reborn – in another form, in another place.

“What is the soul?” he wrote. “It is infinite complexity – we are all an eternal mixture of fragments of past lives.”

Spirits – in Japan – were not monsters from gothic novels. They were part of life. They watched over, taught, reminded. Hearn felt their presence everywhere – in the rusted bells of temples, in the whispers of children’s songs, in the scent of rain falling on a stone bridge. Japan was for him a haunted country – but not by horror, rather by the kindness of ancestors, by the gentle touch of eternity.

And it was here that language became the key to understanding this reality. Hearn analyzed Japanese words with fascination because he believed that language is the most sensitive detector of a culture’s soul.

– Kami – deity, spirit, but also any natural phenomenon that fills a person with reverence. For Hearn, kami was not something external – it was the light within a leaf, an echo in a temple courtyard, the mist over mountain forests.

– Kagami – mirror – the central object in a Shinto shrine. Hearn was moved when he discovered a linguistic subtlety: remove the syllable ga (meaning “I” or “self”) from the word, and what remains is kami.

– That is no coincidence, he wrote. That is revelation. “Remove the ego, and you will see the god.” In this small linguistic play lay the entire message of his spiritual journey.

Lafcadio Hearn as a European Philosopher of Japanese Spirituality

He was neither a theologian nor a systematizer. He did not build temples out of concepts, nor did he lock transcendence into formulas. And yet it was Lafcadio Hearn – not a missionary, not an anthropologist – who became the first true philosopher of Japanese spirituality for the Western world. Not because he described it. But because he felt it.

And he did so not through prayer, but through philosophy. One of the most important impulses in his spiritual thought was his encounter with the work of Herbert Spencer, the evolutionist who sought to grasp the entire world – from biology to society – within one great theory of progress. Hearn absorbed his monumental System of Synthetic Philosophy with greater reverence than he had ever felt for sacred books.

Spencer taught him to see the human not as an individuality, but as a temporary aggregation of cells. “We are only a transient conglomerate of trillions of living units,” Hearn wrote in awe. Cells that after death would decompose and pass into other forms of life – in soil, in trees, in a child. This was not so much reincarnation, as the eternal circulation of biological memory, where every emotion and every impulse leaves a trace in the fabric of the world.

“Each of us is a population – an infinite population of souls, memories, reflexes from uncountable generations past”,he wrote in the essay Dust, one of the most metaphysical texts in his body of work. Elsewhere he added:

“The mind is as much a composite of souls as the body is of cells.”

It was this vision – radically un-Christian, profoundly Japanese in its essence – that allowed him to enter Japan’s spiritual landscape without the moral superiority and disdain so common in the writings of other European authors and travelers. While Sir Ernest Satow mocked Shinto as a childish religion, and Chamberlain called it superstition, Hearn wrote with tenderness:

“It is not rationality that makes a religion important. It is its emotional power, its ability to soothe, to move, to uplift.”

In his eyes, Japanese spirituality—ambiguous, without a central dogma, fluid like the mist drifting over a Buddhist garden—was true precisely because it was aesthetic. Because it did not attempt to be an objective truth, but a lived one.

Hearn saw that the Japanese did not ask about “truth” in the Greek or Christian sense—they did not ask, “Did this happen?” but rather, “Does this move us?” In this spirit, he wrote about their attitude toward ghosts, stories, and rituals:

“A Japanese man may not believe in ghosts—yet on a stormy night he leaves a little sake on the window sill. Not for himself, but for those who may still remember…”

Instead of battling the illusion of the ego, the Japanese sidestepped it. Instead of searching for the “self,” they allowed themselves to be guided by the community—both the living and the dead. Hearn was enchanted by this. He believed that the ego, that inflated Western construct, was the source of loneliness, suffering, and aggression. And that it was precisely this ego, he wrote, which must be removed from the mirror in order to glimpse the reflection of a god:

“Remove ‘ga’ from kagami, and you are left with kami.”

In these linguistic games, in these flashes of emotion—Hearn perceived more spirituality than in theological treatises. For him, beauty was a form of spiritual knowledge. That which moves us, purifies us—even if it is not literal. As he wrote in one of his letters:

“I do not believe in ghosts in the way I do not believe in fairy tales. But I believe in what ghosts and fairy tales do to our hearts.”

In this sense, Japan—a land of kwaidan, of unfinished stories and ceremonies—was not exotic to him, but a deeply metaphysical experience. He did not seek the “real” Japan—but rather the Japan that exists in experience. He did not seek objective religion—but an emotion that makes a child bow before a grandmother’s portrait. And that is why his writing is not merely a source of knowledge about Japan—it is a meditation on its soul.

Kwaidan – Japanese Spirits That Spoke in English

For many Europeans at the dawn of the twentieth century, Kwaidan was what anime and manga would become for our generations: the first encounter with Japan, the first breath from another world that stirred the imagination. Published in 1904, the collection of stories whose full title is Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things was Lafcadio Hearn’s final work and also his spiritual testament. It was not merely a book of ghosts—it was a book with a soul.

Hearn wrote it as Koizumi Yakumo, husband of a Japanese woman, teacher of English in Japanese schools, a man who had passed to the other side of the mirror. But Kwaidan is not just a collection of scary tales, as the title (an archaic form of kaidan, or ghost story) might suggest. It is a lyrical meditation on impermanence, on tenderness toward those who have passed, on beauty embedded in fear, and on the spiritual landscape of Japan, where the boundary between life and death was never sharply drawn.

Hearn wrote:

“One cannot truly understand Japan unless one believes in ghosts.”

And though he understood this in his own, Western way, he did not try to disenchant, expose, or dissect Japan—on the contrary, he allowed its spirits to speak in their own voice.

Stories like Miminashi Hōichi (“Hōichi the Earless”), Yuki-Onna (“The Snow Woman”), or Mujina are now classics of Japanese horror culture. But it is not fear that makes them unforgettable. It is melancholy. It is what the Japanese call mono no aware—the gentle awareness of the transience of things. In Kwaidan, ghosts do not terrify—they remind. They do not seek revenge—they seek remembrance.

For me, as a writer and reader, Kwaidan is not only a window into old Japan, but also a personal childhood memory of my first encounter with Japan that was neither anime nor video games.

In the book, Hearn never imposes his own narrative. He lowers his voice, kneels by the fire, and allows the old men, the monks, the women whose names no one remembers, to speak. Their stories breathe with chill—but also with tenderness. It is a book best read on a winter’s night.

The legacy of Kwaidan is vast. Its 1964 film adaptation, directed by Masaki Kobayashi, is still considered one of the masterpieces of world cinema. But Kwaidan’s greater influence lay elsewhere—in the way the West began to view Japan. Not as a land of samurai and exoticism, but as a space of spiritual resonance, where every object and every memory has a soul.

What Do We Owe Koizumi Yakumo – Hearn?

There is no other writer who managed, as quietly and as vividly, to become a bridge between Japan and the West. Koizumi Yakumo—formerly Lafcadio Hearn—was not just a translator of ghost stories. He was a translator of the soul. Thanks to his tender gaze, the West was, for the first time, able to see Japan not as an exotic spectacle, but as a living, breathing space of spirituality, aesthetics, and inner order.

His writings shaped the development of Japanese studies—not through academic systematization, but through sensual closeness. He inspired Yanagita Kunio, the father of Japanese ethnology, who saw in Kwaidan and Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan a confirmation of the value of folk culture. He delighted Nagai Kafū, who, like Hearn, sought the “old Edo” in the ever-changing Tokyo. Today, echoes of his thought can be found in Alan Booth and Alex Kerr—modern-day chroniclers of a vanishing Japan, of wooden houses, shadows, rustling curtains, and the silence of the world’s threshold.

But Hearn’s influence extended far beyond literature. Before D.T. Suzuki introduced zen to the West, before Alan Watts brought the word “nirvana” into pop culture, Hearn was writing with passion about emptiness, unity, the illusion of the ego, and spirits more real than things. He was neither a missionary nor a scholar. He was a romantic observer who understood that Buddhism and Shintō were not merely systems of belief, but ways of being in the world—full of grace, silence, and humility.

In what we now call the global era, his figure appears prophetic. Here was a man born in Greece, abandoned by his family, raised in Ireland and England, who wrote about ghosts and prostitutes in America, about slavery in Martinique, and who, in Japan—found a home. And though he took on a Japanese surname, he never lost his inner homelessness. That is why he became universal.

Koizumi Yakumo is a spiritual patron of an era in which identities interweave and traditions meet on the borders of languages and cultures. As his biographer wrote:

“He did not belong to Greece, he did not belong to Ireland, he did not belong to Japan. And yet, he belonged to all.”

Let him remain with us as one who teaches us how to look—at beauty, at shadow, at what fades away. And at what—though invisible—endures.

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"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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