朗讀練習- The Importance of Living，Chapter 1 Part 1

來源: 7997 於 2024-05-04 08:54:05 [] [舊帖] [給我悄悄話] 閱讀數 : (7416 bytes)

Chapter One
THE AWAKENING
I. APPROACH TO LIFE
In what follows I am presenting the Chinese point of view, because I
cannot help myself. I am interested only in presenting a view of life
and of things as the best and wisest Chinese minds have seen it and
expressed it in their folk wisdom and their literature. It is an idle
philosophy born of an idle life, evolved in a different age, I am quite
aware. But I cannot help feeling that this view of life is essentially
true, and since we are alike under the skin, what touches the human
heart in one country touches all I shall have to present a view of life
as Chinese poets and scholars evaluated it with their common
sense, their realism and their sense of poetry. I shall attempt to
reveal some of the beauty of the pagan world, a sense of the pathos
and beauty and terror and comedy of life, viewed by a people who
have a strong feeling of the limitations of our existence, and yet
somehow retain a sense of the dignity of human life.
The Chinese philosopher is one who dreams with one eye open,
who views life with love and sweet irony, who mixes his cynicism with
a kindly tolerance, and who alternately wakes up from life’s dream
and then nods again, feeling more alive when he is dreaming than
when he is awake, thereby investing his waking life with a dreamworld
quality. He sees with one eye closed and with one eye opened
the futility of much that goes on around him and of his own
endeavors, but barely retains enough sense of reality to determine to
go through with it. He is seldom disillusioned because he has no
illusions, and seldom disappointed because he never had
extravagant hopes. In this way his spirit is emancipated,
For, after surveying the field of Chinese literature and philosophy, I
come to the conclusion that the highest ideal of Chinese culture has
always been a men with a sense of detachment (takuan) toward life
based on a sense of wise disenchantment From this detachment
comes high-mindedness (k’uanghuai), a high-mindedness which
enables one to go through life with tolerant irony and escape the
temptations of fame and wealth and achievement, and eventually
makes him take what comes. And from this detachment arise also
his sense of freedom, his love of vagabondage and his pride and
nonchalance. It is only with this sense of freedom and nonchalance
that one eventually arrives at the keen and intense joy of living.
It is useless for me to say whether my philosophy is valid or not
for the Westerner. To understand Western life, one would have to
look at it as a Westerner born, with his own temperament, his bodily
attitudes and his own set of nerves. I have no doubt that American
nerves can stand a good many things that Chinese nerves cannot
stand, and vice versa. It is good that it should he so—that we should
all be born different. And yet it is all a question of relativity. I am quite
sure that amidst the hustle and bustle of American life, there is a
great deal of wistfulness, of the divine desire to lie on a plot of grass
under tall beautiful trees of an idle afternoon and just do nothing. The
necessity for such common cries as “Wake up and live” is to me a
good sign that a wise portion of American humanity prefer to dream
the hours away. The American is after all not as bad as all that. It is
only a question whether he will have more or less of that sort of
thing, and how he will arrange to make it possible. Perhaps the
American is merely ashamed of the word “loafing” in a world where
everybody is doing something, but somehow, as sure as I know he is
also an animal, he likes sometimes to have his muscles relaxed, to
stretch on the sand, or to lie still with one leg comfortably curled up
and one arm placed below his head as his pillow If so, he cannot he
very different from Yen Huei, who had exactly that virtue and whom
Confucius desperately admired among all his disciples. The only
thing I desire to see is that he be honest about it, and that he
proclaim to the world that he likes it when he likes it, that it is not
when he is working in the office but when he is lying idly on the sand
that his soul utters, “Life is beautiful”
We are, therefore, about to see a philosophy and art of living as
the mind of the Chinese people as a whole has understood it. I am
inclined to think that, in a good or bad sense, there is nothing like it
in the world. For here we come to an entirely new way of looking at
life by an entirely different type of mind. It is a truism to say that the
culture of any nation is the product of its mind, Consequently, where
there is a national mind so racially different and historically isolated
from the Western cultural world, we have the right to expect new
answers to the problems of life, or what is better, new methods of
approach, or, still better, a new posing of the problems themselves.
We know some of the virtues and deficiencies of that mind, at least
as revealed to us in the historical past. It has a glorious art and a
contemptible science, a magnificent common sense and an intile
logic, a fine womanish chatter about life and no scholastic
philosophy. It is generally known that the Chinese mind is an
intensely practical, hard-headed one, and it is also known to some
lovers of Chinese art that it is a profoundly sensitive mind; by a still
smaller proportion of people, it is accepted as also a profoundly
poetic and philosophical mind. At least the Chinese are noted for
taking things philosophically, which is saying more than the
statement that the Chinese have a great philosophy or have a few
great philosophers. For a nation to have a few philosophers is not so
unusual, but for a nation to take things philosophically is terrific. It is
evident anyway that the Chinese as a nation are more philosophic
than efficient, and that if it were otherwise, no nation could have
survived the high blood pressure of an efficient life for four thousand
years. Four thousand years of efficient living would ruin any nation.
An important consequence is that, while in the West, the insane are
so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so
unusual that we worship them, as anybody who has a knowledge of
Chinese literature will testify-And that, after all, is what I am driving
at. Yes, the Chinese have a light, an almost gay, philosophy, and the
best proof of their philosophic temper is to be found in this wise and
merry philosophy of living.

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