More on Sabi

"Yoshida Kenko (1283-1350), a court poet who took Buddhist vows in his later years . . . a medieval man who possessed both a fine sensitivity for the poignancy of life and the perishability of all things and a profound nostalgia for the customs and ways of the past. . . . Many of Kenko's preferences--for the asymmetrical instead of the regular, for the subtly suggestive rather than the boldly asserted--can be traced to much earlier times in the development of Japanese culture. But one important criterion of his aesthetic taste, expressed most concisely in the term sabi (aged or antique), was distinctly a product of the medieval era. . . . the medieval Japanese developed a strong liking also for things that showed signs of wear and decay, for the withered, the rusted, the broken, and imperfect."
--Japanese Culture by H. Paul Varley.