A Japanese aesthetic of tender, lucid sorrow at impermanence, the "pathos of things," where beauty is intensified by its passing and attention becomes a kind of grief. Mono no aware is attentive and affectionate, feeling the world's transience as poignancy rather than despair.

From Japanese 物の哀れ (mono no aware), literally "the ah-ness of things," where mono is "things" and aware is an exclamatory sensitivity to their moving quality. The phrase crystallized in Japanese literary criticism to name an emotional intelligence: the heart's recognition that to love the world is to accept its vanishing.