Excerpt nr. 1 

"... And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world...."

Author: Walter Pater
Source: victorianweb.org/authors/pater/renaissance/conclusion.html

Excerpt nr.2
"Every time I am shown to an old, dimly lit, and, I would add, impeccably clean toilet in a Nara or Kyoto temple, I am impressed with the singular virtues of Japanese architecture. The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet is truly a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden. The novelist Natsume Sōseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, “a physiological delight” he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where,surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and green leaves."

From In praise of shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki
Source: 
dcrit.sva.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/In-Praise-of-Shadows-Junichiro-Tanizaki.pdf
Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Shadows

Excerpt nr. 3

"The difference between Tanizaki and Pater lies in the tranquillity of the former as against the intensity of the latter. But both share an interesting assumption, which is that the richest experience is wide awake, unclouded by drink or drugs, the senses fresh and lucid in their transparency to the world as it is - and finding in its colours and savours, its textures and transitions, the deepest resource of the value it affords."

Source: 
theguardian.com/books/2002/oct/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview25