A Chat About Life, A Chat About Dreams

Days are like this article — I don't know how to start. But once there is a beginning and the pen is on the page, recording the routine of life, you can scribble a thousand or eight hundred words with ease. But life, no matter how you decide to live it, even if you make a start, how much of it can you really take hold of?

There is a question I have been turning over for years. It seems I think about it constantly, yet at other times it slips from my mind. When I do think of it, it is the sea I have never seen; I imagine its vastness, search for its edge, but again and again I drown in its blue. At first I saw the beach and thought I had reached the shore. Then I saw the rocks and felt I had broken out of the cage. Then I saw the lighthouse, and realized this was the light I had been seeking. But between heaven and earth, soaked in the cold, tasting the salt, tossed on the cresting waves, I was so numb from the cold that this light became like a straw — it could not save my life.

Later, whenever spring warmed and flowers bloomed, I would sit on the beach facing the sea. Then, with the sun on my face, the light pierced deep into my eyes, and I would think of that lighthouse I could not banish.

Who says hope is not curiosity?

If one day I could stand atop that lighthouse and look down on all living things, catching a glimpse of the whole world, would I still be able to return to the bittersweet daily life of home?

I often brandish "one flower, one world" to posture as a cultured person, but always, in the process of leaping from one world to another, in the process of dying in one world and being born in another, I come to understand the besieged city that Mr. Qian Zhongshu wrote of. Each such city is a chaos, each such city a shackle we struggle to escape, only to find, in the end, that we have merely changed our clothes and are still on the road to the execution ground.

The world is infinite, yet it produced us, who are constrained at every turn. For an infinite quantity, no matter how you calculate, you are still just a symbol.

In this program from which you cannot escape, cannot hide, you and I, though we may style ourselves aloof, are ultimately just a function, an algorithm, or merely a variable defined by accident and then forgotten.

What is the bitterness of life, what is the sorrow of death? Life and death are ordinary things. If a process must be endured between them, why choke on the food and put the cart before the horse? After all, only when the flowers fall do the fruits grow.

When I think of this question, life feels close and living feels far. Life is so close I can almost see the soul; living is so far away that everything that exists seems utterly meaningless. When I try to forget this question, ideals feel close and survival feels far. Ideals are so close I could reach out and touch them; survival is so far that all transactions built on money are effortless. And when I have already forgotten this question, reality feels close and I feel far. Reality is so close it's nothing more than daily rice, oil, salt, sauce, and vinegar; I am far away, my bones thirsting for fresh blood, my thoughts sleeping in the grave.

Or perhaps one day, when the rotting bones are covered with maggots, may these thoughts and the epitaph turn to wind, scattering this unending curse.