蟑螂和低血糖

见到第一只蟑螂是在卫生间的地板上，仰面朝天，不动，我想，这香的效果还是不错的。


我打开水龙头的时候另一只从不知什么地方掉了下来，可能是被这一下摔醒了，它开始不断地挣扎。我知道我必须把它踩死，而且它也是底朝上，不是一件很难的事情。但是我下不了脚，但是有时候我们不得不逼自己做一些事情，我不是东郭先生。于是……本来一脚就可以了，可是我却来了一阵抽搐式的乱踩，目的其实是为了不要踩到它。但是最后我还是到了不得不做决定的时候——踩死了就没事了，我还要吃饭呢——我闭上眼睛，解决了它。


出了厕所，想把这两个扫了，结果看到了第三只和第四只，其中一只还是棕色的小小强，全都在动，回头一看，那第一只也醒了。此时我已经无语。我回到自己的桌前，寻找一样合适的东西，我的眼睛扫过茶杯、洗发水、书和手机，没有一个可以用的，我该怎么办，我该怎么办。


我觉得直接用自己的脚去结束一个乱动的的恶心生命是一件极其恐怖的事情，用自己的鞋子来打效果也是一样的。也许用别人的东西会好一点。于是我就地取材，操起Y的拖鞋一记重击——汁液四溅。趁着这个势头，我解决了周围的。


于是我开始扫地。在L的桌下我看到了第5个。不用说还活着。我拿起L的凉鞋看了看，鞋底比较白。因为怕弄脏，我下手很轻，又是抽搐式的一阵乱打，在慌乱中我翻过鞋底看了看却见它已经粘在上面，我跳了起来。


我发现用什么样的东西打都是一样恐怖的，任何一种东西都会变成我肢体的延伸，有一种可怕的亲密感。如果要消除这种感觉，我得站在月球上，用激光瞄准，然后转过身体。



……然后继续。Y的桌下也一个，我不能说我已经麻木了，我只是开始不再惊异于自己的这种抽搐了。打死，扫掉。


我忘了我自己的桌下还没扫。于是——第7个。Don't make me do this again. Don't ever make me do this again. 还好这个中毒比较深，只小动了一下。我把它扫进簸箕，把蚊香的灰烬倒在这群尸体的上面。


终于完成了！不知道是因为余悸还是低血糖，我手脚不断地发抖。可能是还没有吃饭的缘故吧，人在饥饿的时候容易对外界刺激产生比平常更大的反应。


我拿出调羹，到阳台上去洗。当第8只蟑螂出现在水槽里的时候，我往后退了一步，我再也没有力气了。

World-wary? Nah...

"To children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course.
This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable--bewildering, even enigmatic.  Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. You might say that throughout his life a philosopher remains as thin-skinned as a child. 

So now you must choose, Sophie. Are you a child who has not yet become world-weary? Or are you a philosopher who will vow never to become so?"

I have loathed people who pretend to be, or in a worse case, truly are world-weary, in order to suggest how sophisticated they are. (The picture conceived itself that when Guojing was wondering at the special ceremony of Gaibang, someone casting him a contemptuous look and saying “少见多怪！”)I hated them quietly and apologetically, because I was afraid that was out of low self-esteem or jealousy.

Now I can denounce them as contemptuous. Let me recount the occasions where my curious nature was discouraged...

In primary school, we would often go climb the hills together. Each time I saw a beautiful flower, i would tell my friends happily. But Y told me how childish it was to wonder at common flowers as such. 

In high school, one day i was talking with J and playing with my bottle. Suddenly I thought of something, I told her the one who invented the spiral bottle cap must be a genius! And she immediately called me insane. 

Last year, i hold out my newspaper for my roommate to see an African child who was near death. The other roommate C replied without even take a look at it,"what's curious about that? We've seen enough during high school." 

......I hope these things does not succeed in undermining me, or reducing me to some human hardware for the society.

Small-Town News

今天（2009.5.30）出现在《小新说事》中的一个故事：


      本地一渔民在河里捕鱼的时候，发现有一长约一米的动物咬住他的渔网不放，为了保卫他的劳动成果，他一桨打去，结果……就打死了。


     记者对围观的群众进行了采访。
     记者：“你觉得这是什么？”
     一村民：“这个东西头也像老鼠，尾巴也像老鼠，所以应该就是个老鼠。”
     记者：“那老鼠好像没有这么大的么？”
     该村民：“那就是个老鼠王。”


     记者采访了更多的群众，基本上得出的结论就是这是一只基因变异导致体型变大的老鼠（可是，他们不像是《他的国》的读者啊！啊，肯定不是，要不然他们就管它叫龙猫了）。


     此时，围观群众中出现了不同的声音。一个说可能是水獭。另一个很肯定地说，这是一个“獭狸猫 ”——Damn it, it's SO CLOSE! He was ALMOST right! （——因为在节目最后记者终于结束装傻，揭晓谜底的时候，我们得知它的名字是——“獭狸鼠 ”。）


     当这个investigative reporting进行得正酣，当我的胃口都被吊到半空，觉得这不逊于一期走近科学节目的时候——村民们开始架起煤炉，煮起开水，开始给这个X褪毛了。由 于充分展现了当地人民饮食风俗，节目笔锋一转，变成了一期民俗文化秀。我开始想X都被扒了皮，现在记者们只能拿着照片和录像去找专家了，而就这一会儿的功 夫，X已经出炉了。这时又变成了一个美食节目——体验者从浓厚的卤汁中夹起一块肥而不腻的X爪，仔细地品位一番，"Mmmmmn——不错。”

The Siren Went On

Room 328, Academic Building 2B. First time meeting our Lexicology teacher. Turned out she was a pain in the neck. I wanted to sleep but there was blood running through my head. I couldn't stand her any longer but her asserting voice was everywhere. With each sentence she uttered I was trying to rebuttal her. And then, I gave up. Whatever, this was just the first lesson, sooner or later I would be worn out. I looked out of the window.

At 3 o'clock sharp Air Raid Siren went on: it was September 18th.

The siren was vibrating with something suppressed in my heart, it seemed to me, for at some point i felt like crying. If there was any patriotism left in me this was the last bit, persistent and deep. 

The storm of injustice used to batter this vast land and its people - my ancestors, who silently buried their sons and daughters, and lived through a lifetime of confusion without understanding why. Only one or two stories of woe left, told generation by generation in the most impersonal manner.

Though these were only my reveries, they still sent a warm current through my eyes. Quit it, that was too far away...I thought, beginning to picturing myself. I saw me like the protagonist of a movie, gnawing the last bit of a steamed bun as hard as a rock, standing in the gusty winds of a snowing street. Scorching tears were rolling down my face, while the rest was boiling at the back of my nose, and like a fountainhead of power it was sending strength to all my limbs.

Nothing, nothing stirs a human being as much as shame and a sense of being treated unjustly. That moment I have the power only a mad man can summon, and I have to desire to slit of throat of any one walking toward me. The quickness of the knife thrilled me, and the gushing of blood entertained me, and the slaughter went on and on...

But I was prisoned, inside my facade which is more normal and conformed than anybody. The only thing I could do was suicide, but by doing that i contradicted myself: when the self which was deriving pleasure from slaughter was eliminated, the act became a fallacy.

Fate...There is no such thing as fate, otherwise i could just give up any struggle and flow with the tide of it, and between the time when i was wake from my reveries take a look at where it had carried me. Even if i am carried to a world of darkness i would not be sad, because there was no sorrow or remorse when there is no choice to begin with. One never regret some choice made totally by others. Fate is too good to be true.

Rather, as the existentialists suggested, we are created and then abandoned in the world, left alone to working out all the rest. And now I am feeling the huge of burden of it growing heavier and heavier on my shoulder, and I am alone. No one in the world is looking out for me, no one is out there making sure anything be fair to me. Anything can happen. I might have just missed the chance of my life, by simply bending down to tie my shoe.

The pressure of the world is on my shoulder and yet i am still green. What can i do? Now I can only pray, that all that I've done was not in vein.

Fed up of Tutoring...

I decided to open Renren for the last time between now and the foreseeable future. And that was when I saw C's talks with her friends, one of which suggesting that she was earning a thousand a month by teaching English in a Tutoring Institute. That was how much my parents are earning! I was stupefied and deeply stirred inside.

Yesterday I was kind of happy after came back from KY's place, because I sensed her satisfaction with me - through her reiteration of her "overlord items" that I was to teach her son until the end of first semester of my senior year! That was like an eternity. And if H wants me to continue, I will be under even heavier exploitation for at least one and a half years. I never take their asking my state of study seriously, all these are crap - they don't give a damn about what happens to me. Even if i die, they would give a sigh about how delicate life is, and go to WP to find another best student in the English Dept. I was at most a tool. And a very very cheap one.

I closed the window in a fit of rage and self-pity. And opened Lolita, not really in the mood of reading anything. And I saw the first sentence read: "I found a job - teaching English to a group of adults in Autenuil..."

I don't want to be a teacher! I was on the verge of bursting. Even though anything I am doing now suggest I would be a good teacher and there seems nothing else I can do (I indeed have a very bleak outlook), I don't want to be a teacher. I would die before I would be a teacher.

TO HELL WITH IT!

TO HELL WITH IT ALL!

Free, but Alone

Knock, knock.

I ran to open the door, as I always do. Nothing, it was just my roommate C. She came back to fetch something but had forgotten the key. The moment I open the door, I saw her there, her face transparent and glistening as the fantastic effect of the freckle-removing surgery last semester, eyes fixing on the ground where her left foot was located. She was not looking - it was merely vacant. And then without pause - though my account made it seem like there was one - I gave way and she came in. Not a word was exchanged, not even a look.

"Ha, she did not look at me. "I was kind of entertained at this queer realization. And then I quickly decided to step into the washroom right beside the door, and began to wash my hands longer than it usually takes. As the water was running fiercely through the tap, the picture jumped back and asserted itself, the face now dazzling and the pupils jet black, dark as hell. The feeling surfaced from the din of the running water and asserted itself in words: I hate it... I do, I really hate it! Yes, that was why I was washing my hands so strenuously! - Because I hate the fact that I had to open the door to such a look, and nothing else!

Two years have I been living with these people, and I still feel out of place in this dorm. I can more easily identify with the desk than with the various groups I find myself in. But it is rarely something new to me. I have never had the sense of belonging, that's why i don't go to those class gatherings that happen every year. I am afraid I will be cast aside in a corner, out, of place.

Once in our afternoon talks, Tao asked me what would I do if I was invisible, I said I was invisible. I walked and washed and slept in our dorm room like a ghost. I made little noise, and no one seemed to realize my existence.

I shouldn't have complained though- all I wanted was to be free.


-----------------------------------------

• Two days after I wrote this entry, I ran across this sentence in Nausea:

I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.

书摘: Live or Tell (Nausea by Sartre)

This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is
enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives
surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him
through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

But you have to choose: live or tell. For example, when I was in Hamburg, with that Erna girl I
didn’t trust and who was afraid of me, I led a funny sort of life. But I was in the middle of it, I
didn’t think about it. And then one evening, in a little café in San Pauli, she left me to go to the
ladies’ room. I stayed alone, there was a phonograph playing “Blue Skies.” I began to tell myself
what had happened since I landed. I told myself, “The third evening, as I was going into a dance
hall called ha Grotte Bleue, I noticed a large woman, half seas over. And that woman is the one
I am waiting for now, listening to ‘Blue Skies,’ the woman who is going to come back and sit
down at my right and put her arms around my neck.” Then I felt violently that I was having an
adventure. But Erna came back and sat down beside me, she wound her arms around my neck
and I hated her without knowing why. I understand now: one had to begin living again and the
adventure was fading out.

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all.
There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable,
monotonous addition. From time to time you make a semi-total: you say: I’ve been travelling for
three years, I’ve been in Bouville for three years. Neither is there any end: you never leave a
woman, a friend, a city in one go. And then everything looks alike: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers,
everything is the same after two weeks. There are moments—rarely—when you make a
landmark, you realize that you’re going with a woman, in some messy business. The time of a
flash. After that, the procession starts again, you begin to add up hours and days: Monday,
Tuesday, Wednesday. April, May, June. 1924, 1925, 1926.

That’s living. But everything changes when you tell about life; it’s a change no one notices: the
proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; things
happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense. You seem to start at the
beginning: “It was a fine autumn eveningin 1922. I was a notary’s clerk in Marommes.” And in
reality you have started at the end. It was there, invisible and present, it is the one which gives
to words the pomp and value of a beginning. “I was out walking, I had left the town without
realizing it, I was thinking about my money troubles.” This sentence, taken simply for what it
is, means that the man was absorbed, morose, a hundred leagues from an adventure, exactly
in the mood to let things happen without noticing them. But the end is there, transforming
everything. For us, the man is already the hero of the story. His moroseness, his money


troubles are much more precious than ours, they are all gilded by the light of future passions.
And the story goes on in the reverse: instants have stopped piling themselves in a lighthearted
way one on top of the other, they are snapped up by the end of the story which draws them and
each one of them in turn, draws out the preceding instant: “It was night, the street was
deserted.” The phrase is cast out negligently, it seems superfluous; but we do not let ourselves
be caught and we put it aside: this is a piece of information whose value we shall subsequently
appreciate. And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations,
promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not
herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in a night
without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make
his choice.

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered.
You might as well try and catch time by the tail.

“非常新概念”

跨文化交际老师在课上，自豪的告诉我们，他的女儿从小背诵模仿新概念英语，现在初中二年级，那个英语啊是——“非常新概念”！

我一点都不怀疑，因为他自己的英语，讲课也好，讲话也好，就非常非常的“新概念”。那样的英语非常非常适合……给课文录音。听力老师估计也是新概念一族的，因为期末考试的题目引言部分是她读的，字正腔圆，已经达到了鱼目混珠蒙混过关的程度，但是修炼不够，平常上课的时候就自然而然地流回Chinglish了。

为什么他们追求的不是“动听”，“地道”，“清晰”，“流利”，“雄辩”，而是“新概念”呢？读得非常“新概念”那又怎么样呢？从“新概念”这个过渡性目标到更高目标之间是怎样的联系呢？这让我想起K老师, 算了不说了。这些人的共同特点就是实际，目标明确，有很明确的实现这个目标的方法，但是很明显都欠自己一个理由。但是像“很新概念那又怎么样呢，然后呢？”“考出了剑桥英语3级那又怎么样呢？然后呢？”这样的问题会让他们怒发冲冠，或者认为你不够“脚踏实地”，或者直接精神有问题。然后他们照着那个样子活下去，以为只要自己不提出类似问题，这个问题就永远不存在。

他们相信世界是由阿特拉斯背着，阿特拉斯由一只大象驮着，大象站在一只乌龟上面，但是……乌龟站在什么上面呢？在他们皮蛋瘦肉粥一样的意识世界里，弥漫着这样一个斩钉截铁的答案：不 存 在 这 样 一 个 问 题。这是他们赖以生存的防腐剂。

A Spectacular Piece of Human Failure

As a failure I am spectacular. I console myself.

Walking out the classroom, down the stairs, through the crowd flooding to cafeterias, and even sitting down with myself at the lunch table, I feel so out of place, so inferior, so awkward. I am one spectacular piece of human failure, at least physically. The only thing i can rely on is the coming of the cool weather, by then i can put on some thick layers of clothes so that I no longer suffer from the curious gaze of others. But they are really my own gaze. Whenever others are around, I grow extremely sensitive, one unconscious stay of sight would mean a thousand words' despise. Once the water gate is opened, the flood of self-pity will flood forth without means of stopping.

This negative self-consciousness is a cancer eating my total consciousness away. When i am passing the streets, the lanes in school I should have been observing the people around and thinking and reducing them to mere mockery! - instead of busy pitying myself. What is worse, I can think about this problem for a thousand years, and as long as human genetic is not profoundly changed in between there will never be a solution coming up. If Sartre's question which he have thought for a life-time is "being in the world" and "being in the midst of world", then mine would be...this.

The only thing I can do, is to wait for the cool weather. If I ever become a global warming interventionist it is also because of this.

Stuck in a Moment in a Classroom

I was sitting in Classroom A424, Academic Building No. 2, and having the very first lesson of the semester.

The new teacher, with the new course of Interpretation, bored me to tears. His shabby English recalled Xie Guoliang, and that moment, I wanted to laugh. Laugh till my essence and I were one, the kind of laugh that would have cured any disease on calender... Oh Henry Miller.

I was elevated to another level during the summer, with all the books, e-books news and blogs that I read, all the afternoon talks with Tao Yong, and all the blog posts I put up on my blog. Now that I was transferred back to this campus again, I could see how much I have progressed, compared to who I was two months ago.

Ever since last year I have entered this infinite upward spiral. In fact I can't mark any point in my life that I have move up a step, no. Does it even exist? I don't think so. I am actually so enthralled in the whole process that only when I have to stop my work and change environment (from home to school, school to home, what else can it be?) that I have time to realize that I have actually improved. And as it always seems to me, what an improvement!

Each summer or winter holiday I come to school, with the realization that the reading has not been in vein. And each time I get back home, I have the confidence that I will go back with a different person who left home last time.

I was so happy in this mood of realization that the teacher was no matter who, his talking no matter what.

Ugly Mug

It was the first night of the new semester, but i was already in the midst of a deep depression. I guess it was quite a wretched personality to feel pissed off because my roommates didn't go wash themselves when they have taken out their clothes, thus suspending me in a state of indecision, and that they kept asking whether the water was warm enough as if the water heater were their possession and I didn't pay for it anyway, and so on. I felt not free, I feel I was imprisoned by these human shackles.

And what depressed me even more was that I realized the problem might lied in just me. What my mind was not free I cared a lot about those external stuff like whether I can wash myself when I want, instead of being suspended until the whole world went to sleep.

In my extreme distress I turned to my new mug, but it was no help. As a porcelain mug it was a total failure. I bought it because it was on sale in the supermarket and what was more important, it was porcelain. I had always wanted to have a porcelain mug of my own. Anyway, it was the typical product made in china - with childish Chinglish like "we are happy men" and "happy wildness" which you never knew what they were from. If anyone asked, I would say these words does not represent anything about me. And the handle, the handle was a disaster, it was the traditional type upside down! I was suggesting that it was a defective product, but it was deformed. A handle which was big up and small down was chosen as the typical mode because it saved effort, and natural, and beautiful. This was the kind of thing that would get itself deformed in order to be different. Different so that others will notice, so that they could live in the world of reflections.

集合——

最后一次机会了，大家聚一聚，明天就要各奔东西啦~~~

时间有限（2009年9月12日14:22:46），爷爷正在田里采棉花，不一会就会回来，晚上要和妈妈去超市 last-minute shopping, 明天早上去学校，而我的比赛稿子还没有搞定，头还没洗，水还没烧，东西还没整理……时间有限，我只能做一个很简短的回顾。

1.从左到右，第一本是我旧的笔记，已经写满了（相当于一架子书的精华哦）。

2. Mapping the Social Landscape （Sociology textbook），如果说暑假借书回家是我曾经（两个月前）年少无知的表现，那么决定借这本书就是登峰造极的愚蠢行为——纸张太好，太重了。里面有很多对演讲赛比较有用的字词句及观念，都一一做了标记，而且基本上与我现实生活的时间与空间有直接联系的文章都粗略地看过了，但是始终没有下笔记录，可能觉得这是一个比较庞大的工程吧。所以看过的将慢慢被遗忘，gone with the wind...

3. The Barry Diller Story, very helpful, informative, inspiring... Thick but not heavy. Many things learned from this book are still lying dormant, but I am confident that they will come in handy someday. And its power has yet to be dug.

4. Republic. Honestly, I didn't read it.

5. The Castle. Kafka is great.

6. The Prophet. It will be perfect if it excluded all the Chinese translations and illustrations.

7. Brave New World Revisited. This is a real book! 117 pages, smells all paper and ink, and not a word wasted!

8. Guiliver's Travels. I still don't see any reason reading something like that...

9. The Pictures of Dorian Gray. Except for the Chinese translation in the footnotes, I like the book as a whole.

10. The Fall. Another REAL book.

11. The Essential O Henry. I didn't read it thoroughly.

12. 古汉语常用字典。天气凉了，收起来，来年继续给电风扇垫脚。

13. 日记本（后改名写作手稿）（hard cover）。下次假期继续写。

14. 新笔记本。TURN A NEW LEAF!

集合完毕，解散！

一字师

“妈，我要去睡了。”

“……”

“妈，晚安。”

“……”

“妈，嗯……”

“滚。”

做人何必啰里八嗦，互道晚安也不用拖泥带水。

身未动，心已远

Any responsibility and pressure aside, this is going to a free trip. Wherever we will go, one thing is sure - I am going to have a good time as a traveler.

Though I was never conscious of it, I seemed to be good at remembering directions or, more precisely, at new routes. This time, I am going to test my my ability against some bigger place. Forestry University has a veritably vast campus, but after all it is loosely laid out. It is much easier to get lost in a place which is intensively built.

What is important is to forget my body, to dissolve into the backdrop of the atmosphere, leaving only the function of my eyes, ears and nose. Nothing is left of me expect the eyes, ears and nose.

"I heard everything magnified a thousand times, like a homunculus imprisoned in the belly organ. I caught the muffled breathing of the world, as if fixed in the very crossroads of sound."(Henry Miller - Tropic of Capricorn)

In the process I am to think out anything theory of art and science I know against the new things that I come across in this brand new environment. If I ache with apprehension and pity of myself, I sink into it, I become the aching itself. I want to possess that time and space totally, and once possessed, it will be mine to keep for the rest of my life...

* * *

I know full well how the atmosphere is of a speech competition is going to deter a young heart like mine, an intense, competitive and overwhelming atmosphere conspired by serious judges, mature hosts, fancy suits of the contestants, which is determined to bend the mind of the young. But really I am intimidated by nothing more than the herd poison. If I can only meet with them one by one, and hold a conversation long enough for me to have a small round-trip to their consciousness, I guess I will just find the majority of them boring and simple-minded, as the ones I meet back in my own school.

Even if they are people more capable, out-going and learned than I am(after all, what do i know - I am ignorant), what are they as an individual? Student body president elections, prestige among his admirers, first-rate scholarship, translation volunteers, running from one building to another, all kinds of formula that are not transferable to real life wisdom, basketball, special love for digital camera just because his parents are rich enough for him to fancy that, basketball... It all amounts to rubbish heap of memory with a golden crown called "out-standing" in a prestigious university.
"As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too."(Dostoevski - Brothers Karamazov)
They might have more experience, their experience much more fancy than mine, but at our age, no one is wisdom personified. Thus I shall not be afraid of anyone.

If I shall be deterred by their mere appearance or outside show, I am a coward and idiot, thus does not deserve anything.

If I am beat by someone who is truly strong at the core, I accept my failure.

Even if I died, I would demand to know how. I would transact with the devil to know the truth. And that, even if i turned out to be a spectacular failure, will be my ultimate pride, my last consolation.

Frist-hand Experience

"When he was writing about such vast abstractions as Race and History and Providence, Hitler is strictly unreadable. In his philosophical lucubration Hitler was either cloudily daydreaming or reproducing other people's half-baked notions. In his comments on crowds and propaganda he was writing of something he knew by first-hand experience. " (Aldous Huxley - Brave New World Revisited)

"Cloudily daydreaming and reproducing other people's half-baked notions," isn't this what everybody has been doing in speech contests, together with anything but "personal" opinions, theorizing and moral posturing? In a word, that's a whole lot of crap. And even though I am conscious of this problem, I cannot avoid stepping into the same muddle if I try to grab a vast and abstract topic and just start talking nonsense, which however grand and formal it sounds, will never affect my life in any way whatsoever.

What really makes sense, not only in a speech contest, but also all the time before and after that, is "logical analysis of the discernible facts drawn from careful observation."

So it all begins with first-hand experience. Even if my life is barren, i can make it up by careful observation (于无声处听惊雷). I doubt whether all these people who has so much titles and experience have enough time to stop and ponder over the meaning of the things that pass so quickly in front of their eyes. They just rush from one spot to another, twist themselves in order to fit in everything else and become as busy as they can get, never question anything, least of all themselves, and at the end of the day, they call that colorful.

Now that the summer holiday is almost over, I have to step out of my comfort zone, meet new teachers and schoolmates, make new friends and develop old friendship, take part in some inevitable activities, have new classes, continue with my tutor jobs, and meet a whole lot of people and things in the journey to Hangzhou, or whatever it is... I need only to open my eyes and ears to hoard first-hand experience when the flood begins to pour in. Then the night time, before i fall asleep, I need to ponder on these issues that i see and hear and experience, and try my best to impose upon them logical analysis, and make them part of my wisdom.

Always stick to the essence of things. This is what I am going to do.

In Rememberance of May, 2009

Bleed it Out

It was September 1st. I woke up in the morning with the too familiar anguish eating at my heart.

That day was "psychologically important", for it was the first day of primary and middle schools. And as "autumn tiger"(or Indian summer) had just deserted the morning air, the thick and sad autumn atmosphere seeped through my lungs and saturated my blood when I was waking up.

I felt the anguish looming inside myself. I couldn't tell where exactly it was, maybe it was everywhere, in and outside my body. But if it was at the back of my mind, I would like to turn around and face it in the front and pierce through its eyes. If it was a swell on the surface of my skin, I would love to scratch it to my heart's content, until all my fluids bled out, until the white bones can be seen. Then I would look at it with my utmost curiosity and laugh until not a calorie was left.

But as I said, it was everywhere, inside and out, from head to toe. The whole northern hemisphere was saturated with the invisible monster. Everywhere I went it dogged, everywhere I sat it nibbled at my toes. Can't you feel it? Why don't you face it? How can you appear so normal? Or am I the one who is insane!

"Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But uniformity and freedom are incompatible."(Aldous Huxley)

"I bleed it out, digging deeper just to throw it away!" Why not set a fire on this melancholy autumn air, that is pulling you all the way down.

Set it on fire, let the sky burn with your deepest shame and unrest, let the straws of rye explode with the most contemptuous laugh, let me take in the last bit of air as if there is no tomorrow, not even the next minute.

"Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friends; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting..."

I am still fighting.

Beginning of the Preparation

For the past two months at home, what has been preventing me from the actual preparation of the English Speech Competition is that all of them seem so ridiculous. Most of the debates and discussions that we put forward during the summer school together with our tutors were so unrealistic, so devoid of meaning and content that they were like plants uprooted from the soil that is so vital to its existence.

Even if these preparations are going to raise me to the height of the competition, what sense are they going to make after all that? And if not, which is more likely, why waste my time and youth like that? I would prefer reading some Henry Miller and giving a thorough thought about life and future.

Then I just deserted the much beaten path, and rejected Prof. W's philosophy from head to toe. My consolations are Confucius' words that "君子务本，本立而道生"-"The superior man bends his attention to the radical. That being established, all practical courses naturally grow up", and even if I might fail to live up to W's expectation, I will not regret the days spent following my own heart after having lived happily and fulfilled for a whole summer.

Now that there is only 3 days left before the new semester, and a month before we take off to Hangzhou, or wherever it is, I have to come to critical point of making a decision. I can no longer hold out with my detachment. After all, this is a practical world.

So here we go again, last minute preparation.

In the process, I will keep asking myself the following questions:

1. Is this important to me? Why would I care about that?
2. Where do I stand? For whom I speak?
3. Isn't this what everybody is saying?
4. Do I believe what I just said?
5. Is this the actual truth or just what I think, or conjure up?
6. Is this my wishful thinking?
7. Does this have significance to me? Is it going to change the way I think?
8. Am I going to be approved after I figure out this question?
9. Will I give the same answer if asked by my own conscience?
10. Am I lying? Do I have to lie in this one?
11. What is the truth? What will not change, what is unalterable?
12. Is this universally true, or just for China? Is this an eternal truth, or just a temporary one?

Confusion...

"Confusion is a word we invented for an order which is not understood. I like to dwell on this period when things were taking shape because the order, if it were understood, must have been dazzling."
(Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn)

Right now I am in the middle of huge confusion-taking part in the CCTV Cup English Speaking Contest, which is going to begin in a month's time. This is a very short time to prepare because the coming semester is a busy one, with 33 lessons per week, plus two tutoring jobs.

Actually I participated in it last year, but since I didn't get a good result I couldn't say I figured it out. It takes a winner of a competition to instruct us the methods of winning, though not every winner knows consciously what it is that makes him win out. All through these years, English competitions all around China have churned out numerous winners every year, some of them are really good, but most of them are too far to reach. You can find their interviews from some news websites or forums, but useful information are limited. The essence is always easy to convey, like "read more, speak more", but the rest of the specifics we are supposed to figure out for our own. And what a confusion it is when it comes to the everyday details!

But Henry Miller gives me a good perspective, instead of evading or toiling for this situation as a despot, I can now enjoy the process of staying in this confusion and trying to muscle my way out, looking forward to the day when I finally disentangle myself from this mess and get out from the best exit.

That day, when I look back, I will see the order which I was not manage to see in the process. The experience will be ever more illuminating because it gives me a sense of order, which leave me tremendous courage to go further on the chosen path and also to start something new.

书摘: Henry Miller on Friendship

He was a teacher and an exemplar: he had only to open his mouth for me to realize that I was listening to a wisdom which was utterly different from anything which I had heretofore associated with that word.

He was continually talking about himself and his relation to the world about, a quality which created the unfortunate impression that he was simply a blatant egotist.

By comparison I was very bookish, intellectual, and worldly in a wrong way. But almost immediately I discarded this side of my nature and allowed myself to bask in the warm, immediate light which is profound and natural intuition of things created. To come into his presence gave me the sensation of being undressed, or rather peeled, for it was much more than mere nakedness which he demanded of the person he was talking to. In talking to me he addressed himself to a me whose existence I had only dimly suspected, the me, for example, which emerged when, suddenly, reading a book I realized that I had been dreaming. Few books had this faculty of putting me into a trance, this trance of utter lucidity in which, unknown to oneself, one makes the deepest resolutions. Roy Hamilton's conversation partook of this quality. It made me more than ever alert, preternaturally alert, without at the same time crumbling the fabric of dream. He was appealing, in other words, to the germ of the self, to the being who would eventually outgrow the naked personality, the synthetic individuality, and leave me truly alone and solitary in order to work out my own proper destiny.

Our talk was like a secret language in the midst of which the others went to sleep or faded away like ghosts. For my friend MacGregor it was baffling and irritating: he knew me more intimately than any of the other fellows but he had never found anything in me to correspond to the character which I now presented him with. He spoke of Roy Hamilton as a bad influence, which again was deeply true since this unexpected meeting with his half-brother served more than anything else to alienate us. Hamilton opened my eyes and gave me new values, and though later I was to lose the vision which he had bequeathed me, nevertheless I could never again see the world, or my friends, as I had seen them prior to his coming.

Hamilton altered me profoundly, as only a rare book, a rare personality, a rare experience, can alter one. For the first time in my life I understood what it was to experience a vital friendship and yet not to feel enslaved or attached because of the experience. Never, after we parted, did I feel the need of his actual presence: he had given himself completely and I possessed him without being possessed. It was the first dean, whole experience of friendship, and it was never duplicated by any other friend. Hamilton was friendship itself, rather than a friend. He was the symbol personified and consequently entirely satisfactory hence no longer necessary to me. He himself understood this thoroughly.

Perhaps it was the fact of having no father that pushed him along the road towards the discovery of the self, which is the final process of identification with the world and the realization consequently of the useless-ness of ties. Certainly, as he stood then, in the full plenitude of self-realization, no one was necessary to him, least of all the father of flesh and blood whom he vainly sought in Mr. MacGregor. It must have been in the nature of a last test for him, his coming East and seeking out his real father, for when he said good-bye, when he renounced Air. MacGregor and Mr. Hamilton also, he was like a man who had purified himself of all dross. Never have I seen a man look so single, so utterly alone and alive and confident of the future as Roy Hamilton looked when he said good-bye.

Is it really me that is rotting in this bright California sunshine? Is there nothing left of me, of all that I was up to this moment? Let me think a bit... There was Arizona. I remember now that it was already night when I first set foot on Arizona soil. Just light enough to catch the last glimpse of a fading mesa. I am walking through the main street of a little town whose name is lost. What am I doing here on this street, in this town? Why, I am in love with Arizona, an Arizona of the mind which I search for in vain with my two good eyes. In the train there was still with me the Arizona which I had brought from New York - even after we had crossed the state line. Was there not a bridge over a canyon which had startled me out of my reverie? A bridge such as I had never seen before, a natural bridge created by a cataclysmic eruption thousands of years ago? And over this bridge I had seen a man crossing, a man who looked like an Indian, and he was riding a horse and there was a long saddle-bag hanging beside the stirrup. A natural millenary bridge which in the dying sun with air so clear looked like the youngest, newest bridge imaginable. And over that bridge so strong, so durable, there passed, praise be to God, just a man and a horse, nothing more. This then was Arizona, and Arizona was not a figment of the imagination but the imagination itself dressed as a horse and rider. And this was even more than the imagination itself because there was no aura of ambiguity but only sharply and dead isolate the thing itself which was the dream and the dreamer himself seated on horseback. And as the train stops I put my foot down and my foot has put a deep hole in the dream: I am in the Arizona town which is listed in the timetable and it is only the geographical Arizona which anybody can visit who has the money. I am walking along the main street with a valise and I see hamburger sandwiches and real estate offices. I feel so terribly deceived and I begin to weep. It is dark now and I stand at the end of a street, where the desert begins, and I weep like a fool. Which me is this weeping? Why it is the new little me which had begun to germinate back in Brooklyn and which is now in the midst of a vast desert and doomed to perish. Now, Roy Hamilton, I need you! I need you for one moment, just one little moment, while I am falling apart. I need you because I was not quite ready to do what I have done. And do I not remember your telling me that it was unnecessary to make the trip, but to do it if I must? Why didn't you persuade me not to go? Ah, to persuade was never his way. And to ask advice was never my way. So here I am, bankrupt in the desert, and the bridge which was real is behind me and what is unreal is before me and Christ only knows I am so puzzled and bewildered that if I could sink into the earth and disappear I would do so.

Voracious as a Black Hole

Closing the connection window with Tao on QQ, I suddenly felt that I wanted to be a better person, I wanted to learn more in a short period of time, like 24 hours, so that I would have more ideas and feelings to communicate to him tomorrow.

Left with a skull hollowed out from searching and squeezing, I felt left impotent as a jellyfish with my dry thoughts and feelings.

I felt connected.

Some part of myself was expressed, away from me. Thus some burden can be unloaded from my shoulder, and new space was left for new ideas and feelings.

That moment I felt as voracious as a black hole.

Tao taught me a lot of things. Among others, I came to a better understanding about something I agreed to a long time ago (namely, "只有同一高度的云才能相遇成雨" and "他能说各种语言，也就能和一切心灵打成一片"), and had a chance to put them into practice. By talking to him, and in constantly came to a blank mind when he asked my opinion about something he was thinking about, I felt the urgent need to learn and think about more things, so that I can be at the same plane with his mind when he is talking about something, thus understanding him more easily; better, to have some vibrations and some materials in my mind to discuss with him; and better still, if i have a much more thorough observation and clearer understanding than him.

Voracious as a black hole.

蚊子被什么吸引？

摇头电扇交替吹着电脑和我，我的眼睛交替扫视着两部关于两个城市的小说。

下午三点，决定停一下，去专心地吃一点东西，消耗一下家里的零食库存。于是冒着糟蹋电的危险开着冰箱相了好久，终于选中一支包装朴素的冰棍，洗了一个红苹果，回到电脑前面。

看着冰棍要拆的时候，我想，我是被这扑扑冒出来的冷气催促着才做出这个决定的，不要期望是什么好东西。当我把它的包装剥掉的时候，我想，也不赖，不就是快冰吗。然后我把它放进了嘴里……这时的理解终于全面了，这原来是一支盐水棒冰。当初我还是个被夏天的太阳晒得像非洲难民的小屁孩的时候，叫我去商店，我也是最后一个才会选这玩意儿。我把包装拿来仔细一看，上面印的两个小孩形容非常之怀旧，让我想起我小时候潜入爷爷奶奶房间看的二哥的小学课本上的人物形状，不禁再看了一下生产日期，我很怀疑它是1993年生产的。

吃得口里索然无味，想起苹果，拿来咬了一口。突然一种极为熟悉的味道涌来，这不是我上午吃的话梅么。

于是又拿来包装纸看了一下。冰棍的配料是白砂糖，淀粉，食盐，食用香精，柠檬酸，糖精钠。
话梅是：白砂糖，食盐，甘草，柠檬酸，甜蜜素，糖精钠，安赛蜜，二氧化钛，阿巴斯甜，食用香料，苯甲酸钠，山梨酸钾，日落黄，柠檬黄。

想来确是，冰棍的化学添加剂里面加以苹果的糖，有机酸，生物碱以及淀粉，不就是话梅了么。原来我从小到大一直所熟知的这种味道并不是话梅独有的，而是几种特定的化学添加剂搅拌在一起，融入一种像淀粉这样简单的载体里面就行了。于是胃口大减。嘬完棒冰，把苹果吃了是正经，顺便休息一下眼睛，背靠椅子向窗外望。

只见两只白纹依蚊一前一后从我的房门口赶集一样地朝我的方向飞来，我一手举着苹果，一手拿着纸巾，顿时不知如何是好。蚊子到底是被什么吸引过来的呢？甜味？汗液？恨我贪心，一下子吃两样东西，又不开电扇，现在分不清了。在我接通两个网络连接，登陆Blogger的时间里，又有若干中华按蚊也进来了，由于心疼刚买又所剩无几的从来不发生效用的Li字蚊香，我执意按兵不动。在打完这些文字的过程中，我主动离开座位追击了两个，但都铩羽而归；将连续工作了有24小时的电风扇加大马力，把身体瘦小的依蚊保持在一定的距离之外；无意中也碾死了两个，偶尔仍有几个从我屏幕前悠闲散漫地飞过，让我体验了什么叫投鼠忌器。

我对着电脑，读着电子书，心想为什么灿烂的华夏文明和先进的现代科学，以及我们千千万万爱民如子的父母官，以及全球经济危机时代7.9%的GDP，没有解决困扰我这个乡下人的蚊子问题？

Reminder

It concerns the stance and identity problem. When i come across a problem where i am required to take a stand, firstly i will think who i am, am i in any of the camp, if not, from what stance i speak, for whose interest i stand up to.

是熟稔，不是智力

What we can learn mostly just stay at the level of the very thing we do.

So taking the contest will not improve my English. What will work has already been done along the time proceeding it. It is a process. I take advantage of it. I am on the right way. If my reading does not help, it was because i hadn't read enough for it to help. People blessed with various experience will not threaten me now, because without actual learning, all they've got is just false confidence. They probably got more chance talking, that is what make them fluent. That is what i need to put most of energy and catch up with them. Fluency of talking crap!

If you can't finish the paper in due time, it does not mean you doesn't arrange your time properly or that you are slow, it means you don't understand, you don't get it. People don't arrange their time, they just finish it as it should. Just imagine what the paper would be like in the eye of a native speaker, and try to make yourself move toward his level.

So it comes down to very simple questions- if you know it, everything is right, you seldom make a mistake, you are cocksure of the answer, you finish it with lightening speed, time will be abundant throughout the paper. If you didn't know it, you misunderstand the question, can't judge the intention of the tester, you got stuck and held up by it, time elapse without you knowing it, you wished you could have time to go back and redo it but you know in reality this is not likely, time became more and more tight and you can't focus on the rest of the questions- everything went wrong. But the question is you come back blaming the ramifications instead of the very reason of it. So the more you know, the quicker and accurate your understanding, the better the turn out.

One day in senior high, i asked ZKP about the skills of doing science papers, what he said about it i already forgot. Now that i think about it, maybe it was because i did not get what i wanted to hear, or in other words, which is helpful to me. Today i happened to be in the same situation as he was two years ago, i suddenly understood- it is not about skills, it is all about whether you know it or not. Why he is good at doing science paper and getting amazing scores? Because they just know, just know how to do it, to solve the questions. As long as they know it, they can just go for it, from the beginning to the end, thus no problem with any kind of "strategy", "time arrangement" or whatsoever. When you are worrying whether you can finish the paper on time or making some stupid mistakes along the way, it means there is something wrong with how much on earth do you know. If you are truly good, you take the challenge and enjoy it. You feel fulfilled by solving these problems, you take delight in doing the paper. And ultimately, which i have not reached yet, eager to know the result, or still higher, can calculate your score to the very exact.

It is Who I am that Matters

陈丹青：文章的张力，是人格的张力；写作的维度，是人格的维度。

At the end of the day, it is who I am that matters, not what i do or say at that particular moment.

They judge me according to my performance, but it is not performances they are choosing from, it is persons that they are choosing from.

The nature of what Prof. W is leading us to do is to prepare some limited range of topics, piecing together ideas from all sides, and merging them into one single perfect and dead piece of 3-min...stuff. If that is what everyone do for winning, there is something profoundly wrong with the education as a whole.

So my idea is in essence opposed to W's. I insist in being a better known and informed person, so that when i am in the competition, i can show them who i am, and how qualified i am in ways that best express myself.

What he is trying to stuffing into our brains are cliche topics, all-round opinions which are dead to me, and a form that i does not agree with.

But whatever i say is weak and can not stand a single blow, since i am far from being a specimen of success. So i am first of all go ahead with myself, fight the war inside my skulls, break the old and corrupted part of thinking into a chaos, and establish a new order. Until i am successful enough i can speak with confidence, assurance, and a clear-mind that HE IS WRONG.

It's NOT about Memory!

So i figured out today it is not about having a quick mind, a quick mouth whatsoever, it is about being familiar with the thing.

If i know the subject as well as i know my own objects, e.g., the favourite book i have read, the software or web tool i feel most at home with, the TV show i like the best, etc.

The idea is to create an information asymmetry. That is, if the judge know more about the subject than me, i have no chance of winning, but if otherwise, i will definitely control the whole thing. This is not that impossible, just see how i beat T on the reviews of the texts. With the same amount of information, i can be better than her, so if i know totally more about the subject than the judges, the game is mine.

If i don't know much about the subject, i feel insecure before i am confronted with it. I go through the whole process without confidence. When i meet with it, i draw a blank within my mind. Words rushing out without order and trigger words repeat themselves in every sentence. People think i can't speak English well, and my mind is in a shambles, i don't have logic, i am not "quick" enough, etc, etc. And before i realized the truth tonight, i would think that way, under their influence, and thought that is what i need to work on, say my memory, my "quickness" of the mind, but those things are among which that are already determined before birth.

Things are totally different outside the vicious circle. If i am familiar with enough things as to cover any questions the judges will come up with, i will walk up to the stage with confidence, self-belief. When the question is uttered, i will smile and think to myself all is under control. I see what the judge is thinking about, i can predict what he might want to say next, what he already has in mind, what i might say might inform him of something new...

All i need to do is to weigh them down with what i know and see.

Since i know these college professors to be mostly...lame, i can see myself reach that point within a short time. But it is not a time to drift and wait, but to hold on something essential and fight. Fight!

Possess the question, do not let the question possess me. Then i have to be bigger than the question. Don't let the stage, the crowd, the judges consume me.

So this is the idea behind the whole thing: i will figure out what the competition and every part of it is about, what is my ultimate perfection, and how can i reach that perfection.

Another lesson i drew from the competition was that a concise and witty answer which addresses right to the heart of the problem is 100 times better than a premeditated or calculated "theory" which fails to disguise itself. The former is much much harder than the latter because it requires an exhaustive thinking experience, while the latter is dealing mainly with...nonsense.

Rudiments of my Shallow Political Understanding: for Future Reference

One thing negative about dialectics is that it presupposes the end of all objects of evaluation are contradictions. This is so frustrating that it immediately dampens any attempt to probe into any questions like that. That is remotely true of why somewhere along the line i stopped being the child who by nature liked to think about all the things ranging from food to the universe, and suddenly joined the majority of the public who can't think and would not make any attempt in that direction. When i no longer trusted my own thinking ability, i stopped thinking and caught hold of anything that was crammed to me. I became stupid and highly suggestible.
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It is just that under the influence of decades of education which tells them fixed answers about what is right and wrong, they come out not calling it wrong. They tend to accept the society the way it is and think that it is the best result because they have not seen otherwise. What all the politics teacher do is to tell the students a modified and spun theory which is near perfect after all those remedies, and it appears that where we are now is out of history necessity and every decision the party make is right, and our time is best of all; the reality may not be perfect but it is the best outcome and we are getting better and better, so....

You want every student to live up to the fullest of their potentials and know about the truth, but the country or the party can't afford to allow that happen. And after so many years of modern education, there is plenty of fools in store. So they probably don't need to worry about that. The society would run out of time before it run out of well-meaning and patronizing citizens. He speaks out. And i would rather live my own life to the fullest.

Textbook Article Reviews

Class Review: Mountain Lion's Attack

Mountain Lion's Attack by Deborah Morris, was the text we had today, in our Integrated Course of English Language. I didn't preview it, so my first time of reading it was guided by Ms T. Under her instruction i came away with the general impression that the writing was effective and compelling, and the article was mainly about scout and gallantry. Now that i got out of her influence and looked at it myself, i realized that this article was neither about scout nor gallantry, it was about, and it concluded itself to a mystical experience.

Para 11. I know sometimes God gets your attention in mysterious way. So i decided to listen to that voice.

Para 21(the last one). I guess i did save him, but not without help. As a scout, i still live by the "Be prepared" motto. But now i understand that means more than wearing the right clothes and carrying the right gear. It means being prepared to really listen when somebody's giving me divine directions.

Somehow Ms T missed the point when she briefly addressed the last sentence. She didn't seem to give the word "divine" enough credit for its due weight in the wrapping up of the piece. She did for once mention the mystical experience though, where she used a telepathic incident between Jane Eyre and Rochester, which reminds me of a chap in Does the Center Hold concerning art and illusion.

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Class Review: Never Give In, Never, Never, Never (Oct. 1941)

The first time i read this speech, i was not impressed, probably because i did not like Miss Tao's interpretation of it. But a semester later, when i have to reread it in preparation of the finals, i was deeply, deeply impressed by its conciseness, effectiveness and timelessness.

"Never give in" is not that a platitude as i supposed it to be. It is like connecting the dots while looking backward, seeing something we fail to see while living forward, and drawing a valuable lesson for the time to come.

He extracts essence from the dry and elusive facts and gives them significance by shedding light upon the hidden side of it which the average people fail to conscious of.

"Do not let us speak of darker days: let speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark day, these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race."

This is the most powerful part of this speech, not the catchword "never, never, never" in that this bestows meaning, dignity and significance to what the people are doing, and the people themselves. No matter whether the situation of getting better or worse, if you just look at what you are suffering and say, "this doesn't make any sense", then nothing will make a difference on you. "Those who have to fight much find reasons for fighting."_Jean-paul Sartre. He first let people believe this whole thing is a noble cause, then they are fortunate and important to be a part of it.

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Class Review: The Discus Thrower (1983)

Somehow Miss Tao was misguided along the way to believe that most people believe literature must serve a "great" purpose, which is not the case and probably inherited its stamp from Marxism, together with the vagueness of the theory itself. So she just made a point that is already manifest among people who have ever ventured to think about the function of literature. And i am also suspicious that despite the justification of her point, she might have arrived at that only because she failed to figure out the purpose of the article.

I don't believe anyone can do anything well or worthwhile without a purpose to begin with.

And then he laughs. It's a sound you have never heard. It is something new under the sun. It could cure cancer.
Fyodor Dostoevsky: god gives women hysteria as a relief.
This is relief, kind of verging on hysteria.
Relief, laugh, hysteria, venting...but so far there is not a word fittest to describe the sound that the doctor has just heard. It is different because it is vicious, but vicious towards all the absurd, the pretentious, the hypocrisy.

Reading The Reprieve

A great writer can at the same time be a man and a woman, a professor and an illiterate, a parent and an adolescent...all at the same time. But how was he able to do that? And even if he had been all these, how aware and acute is he to have felt all these! And, not only could he get under their skin, he could even dig in their subconsciousness.

There are moments in this book while i think to myself, this is me, this is how i am, what i used to be, this is how i feel, what i want to be, and this is what is in other people that i loathe... There is every thing.

It is timeless, not confined to a single race or country either. It is a depiction of the permanent human mind.

Among them, swinging of the mind and the process of growth are also hard but good things to write.

Reading the dialogue between Czechs, German and French, i thought to myself, if it was in my country, this book would not have been allowed to be published. To avoid dissident thoughts of unorthodoxy inclinations, any kind of personal interpretation is banned, the party documentary being the only orthodox. That's why our recent history has not been and will not be adorned with any literature or art that can be called "great" or timeless.

Fragments: Words and the Mind (II)

Fancy Words

If something is not comprehensible to you, first, don't be afraid. Second, it is just disguised by fancy words put in place in order to make them seem...civil, orthodoxy or formal, but at the root it can be stripped down to very simple and silly facts, almost always recognizable human experiences and daily thoughts.

What i need to do to understand is to strip the fancy words down to the very root of its meaning, believe nothing is incomprehensible to me and relish each moment of comprehension.

"he understands anything that has happened to him, it is all that he has, his ultimate pride. "

If that will be my ultimate pride, then to discern any plain truth from a world of fancy words and the froth of nonsense will be my ultimate weapon.

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Metaphors

When I can't see something clearly enough, I use figurative methods.

But people who think clearly speak plainly. The closer we are to the truth, the more clearly we see, and the plainer our language can be. Plain language is more advanced than metaphors or similes.

Metaphors are a good way of demonstration, of course. But before we explain anything to other people, we should make sure that we know the very truth of the it already. While we are approaching the the mountaintop of truth, we should not be satisfied to stop at the clouds of metaphors.

当一个问题在我的脑子里没有成形的时候，我只能用比喻来描述他的抽象的面貌。

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When Words Fails Us

什么时候我们需要丰富的肢体语言？

1) 初掌握一门外语，不能明确表达出自己的意思；
2) 不善于表达，而刚好情绪喷涌或有一个复杂的思想要表达；
3) 这门语言本身学到极致的时候仍然缺乏表现力。

曾经新闻里看到一个畸形儿上下眼皮没有分开，他成天痛苦得将嘴巴张到最大。人的思想意识之于用于表达它的语言，就像浩瀚的宇宙之于人的感官。人所能运用的语言越丰富，他的思想表达就越充分，那些辅助的条件，如手势，表情，其它肢体语言，甚至于书面的感叹词，惊叹号等等就越没有必要。所以，我认为，肢体语言少是语言表达能力强的表现，而在演讲中，这个似乎没有被大家接受，人们还是喜欢那些充满flourish 的选手，不管是否生硬或恰当。

"When you're digging down deep to bring out emotion, there are a lot of places to dissipate, and the hands are one of them. No hand gestures. What can happen is, the power that were coming out of the fingers and the toes can come out of your eyes. "

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Language and Cognition

"We can only see the universe through the limited prism of our senses." our senses are more precisely windows through which we can have a limited view of the vast cosmos. And human consciousness collectively is almost as vast as the cosmos. Words are the limited means we can use to peer through and describe our thoughts.

"Class in America is like sex in Victorian times: people believe that if no one talks about it, it will just go away."

This is a part (the most widely ignored part) of information abuse, where people (with the power of information distribution, purposefully or out of mental laziness ) refuse to give some existing notion (thoughts, phenomena, differences, truth, etc.) a proper name or put them forward. Since "words are a lens to focus one's mind", if we don't give the thing a name, pin it down, define it and use it, it will be drifting in and out of our consciousness. When it's number is up, it will just vanish. Thus, escaping the consciousness and attention of people on the receiving end of information.

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Imagery and Mental Pictures

Up until I have known an amount of words, but what does it mean that i know them? A small portion of them are very familiar to me due to everyday usage: no problem about that. But among them are also words which are so overused, misused, misunderstood, neglected or worn-out that they almost mean nothing to either the speaker or the listener when uttered. A great deal more of words, less frequently appeared, produce the same effect, but due to different reasons, either i don't care about their meaning or their appearance now and then make a false impression that i already know what they mean. So when confronted, these words are the easiest to escape my consciousness, because without stirring up a vivid mental picture, they are nothing more than a word. A word without carrying a meaning is a nonsense.

As i mentioned before, words are windows to peer through our vast consciousness. The ultimate goal of using words is to achieve free exchange of man's consciousness. A passage, made up of hundreds or thousands of words, is a huge glass wall consists of such little windows. The core of the reading problem is to make sure that we actually see something through each of the windows, and the clearer the better. Thus coming to the accuracy issue.

When i was watching The Mentalist, the one with the casino, Patrick Jane showed how he remembers all the cards: he chooses his favourite and most familiar place, where his father used to take him to, something like a palace, and he imagined each cards to be some certain characters, each of them in one of the chambers in the palace...This is worth thinking about further, but here i will just mention the power of mental pictures and imagination, and in addition, the surprising feats of memory concerning something you really like.
As words can appear both on paper and by air wave, the mental picture thing is also applicable to listening.

Why we think it's OK to eat beef and pork, but not rabbits? Because we are so accustomed to eating beef and pork that these two words succeeded in cutting off their association with cattle and pig. We seldom have a picture of cattle in our mind when eating or talking about beef, do we? And as to rabbit, you know it's hard not to picture a lovely, tiny, red-eyed rabbit.

From Dorian Gray to Infertility

How interesting life is, if you pay enough attention to it.

Yesterday i resumed reading The Picture of Dorian Gray since i dropped it off when i had some minor waist injuries. I was half way through and the stories went at the point of Dorian Gray's brief and heart-breaking love-affair with a lovely but pathetic young actress.

And today i was looking for a film by Julia Roberts and i settled for Notting Hill. That was how i spent this easy morning and a while after lunch. This was exactly another story about someone's

And after i finished watching this film, i turned on BBC Radio 4, and in the news casts it mentioned a woman who had an accident and was chained to the wheelchair, who was at the same time looking for treatment for infertility! That was same situation with the woman in Notting Hill, who was the protagonist's friend! I wondered if i kept on tracking the details i was going to make this chain indefinite. Interesting.

...

Just finished watching The Good Girl, and i thought, good, another story about a family messed up by infertility.
love affair with an actress!

The Intensity

It is desperate, crazy but ecstatic.

I am clinging to any scratch of time i can use,
Learning anything within my reach,
Applying any knowledge i have learnt to the problems i deal with,
Eating and probably digesting anything that i gulp down my throat.

Life has never been more intense.

June 23, 2009

Review: The Pursuit of Happyness

When I was going though the film, the thing that struck me the most was the "pursuit"-in the literal sense of the word. In order of their appearance, he first of all pursued the hippy girl for his scanner without success, then caught her another day and got it back; then he was pursued by the cab driver, lost his second scanner in catching the subway; the third time, he got out of the detention house and made a mad run for his interview, then tried to catch the bum in vain but got hit by a car and lost a shoe; the fourth time, missed an appointment despite of the mad pursuit and at last, retrieved his device from the bum... Though sometimes it is not clear whether he is pursuing happiness or being pursued by life.

But when I look back and check all the pursuing scenes out, I find they don't really make up the bulk of the film as they appear to be, I have to skip long intervals to find out these clues, but they give me an impression much more stronger than the rest of the film partly because they constantly remind me that the road to happiness is a pursuit, not waiting, not casual searching, but a mad pursuit.

Sometimes life puts you on the verge of collapsing. You are on the fringe that if you let go, it hardly can get any worse, everything (dream, talent, honor, potential...) then drifts away like they never existed, and if you run and scramble and snatch and hang on long enough until hope looms from the horizon, miracles do happen.

What is in Chris Gardner that made him pull through is not some strongly manifested determination, or faith of any kind, nor do i think the word "optimism" is the highlight of his character. It is his underlying persistence in refusing to be blown into the mindset of sloth, of letting go. That is so strong that he never even shows any inclination of giving up. Otherwise none of the above listed pursuits will happen- he could just lie down and accept, saying "Good riddance", "that's life" or "tomorrow is another day." I believe this very character is the fountainhead of his life's pursuit of happiness and also one of the core messages that the film wants to get across.

Then there is the question as old as mankind-happiness. Though we all expect it to happen in the end-the typical rags-to-riches success- when the moment comes, it never fail to fill our eyes with tears. Somewhere near the end of the story Chris says "...my constant disappointment in my ten-gallon head...because when i was young and getting A in history tests or something, whatever, i got this good feeling about all the things that i would be, and then i never became any of them." And then fast forward to the ending - this is a story of a dream lost and found, and the very moment of reunion with our long-lost dream is the "little part" of happiness. We break in tears at this point because this is something we all share.

In addition, somehow I feel this film is partly inspired by another movie Lola Rennt, or Run Lola Run. One thing is about the running and rushing scenes. Another is that the bum in The Pursuit of Happiness very much resembles the one in that German film. And i come to the conclusion that if you lose something important in public place, it is almost always taken away by a lucky bum, and you can always take it back.

Review:《我的青春谁做主》

我的室友前阵子在寝室里看《我的青春谁做主》，全程外放，我是被逼着从头到尾“听”完这部电视的。后来我在家里看电视的时候开到这个，看了几眼，发现画面里面的美女帅哥和高楼豪宅确实可以使一部“不堪入耳”的电视剧变得还稍微可以忍受。以下是我在听完这部电视之后的感觉。

有一集里面的“经济基础决定上层建筑”这句话被重复了不知多少遍，到了让我抓狂的地步，我真想过去把我的室友一脚踢翻，然后砸了她的电脑。

在很多不同的情境中，我脑子里总是出现同样一幅画面：当小主人公们因为生活和工作而纠结时，慈祥的外公外婆伯伯婶婶就开始转身面对镜头，开始向电视机前的小朋友们教授“人生哲理”。

说教永远停留在态度层面，和我高中时肤浅而不切实际的自我鼓励没有任何区别。我一度觉得这些台词来自于思想政治教科书的前言寄语部分。

我的同龄人们之所以喜欢这部电视剧，觉得它有意义，可能是因为他们identify with the characters in it. 它让你感觉原来大家都是一样的，everyone feels like you. 从而当他们走出阴霾发奋向上的时候，你也精神为之一振。剧内剧外，大家都是那种dumb little kids who never question anything and are happy that way. In that surreal world conspired by youth idol drama and socialist culture, they believe to get things solved, nothing needs to be done except for a sudden change of attitude.

Caution! 当你在看《我的青春谁做主》的时候，你的青春已经被廉价偶像剧做主了。

June 5, 2009

A Make-Believe Interview: They Want anything but the Truth

I don't know whether this is from the top down or from the bottom up. This whole scheme is like a miniature - well, interview.

First and foremost there is the student (the ill-informed mass) they are, stereotypically, in trouble, confused,and can hardly think for their own.

Then there is the student body leaders or the students affairs teachers acting as the government. They are the brain behind the scene. They dictate what the public needs to know, determine the tone and remote control the whole process.

In between is the platform which glues the two parts together. Media, they are called, or propaganda. (isn't all media propaganda?) then on the platform, we need some student representatives - the excellent part of the population is of no use here- they need the dumb ones so that they can truly represent the majority of the public.

Then there is the expert. The fact that the brain behind the scene dictates the subject and predetermines the tone before they go and find the right expert may have tipped you off already. They either find the expert who hold the view which happened to, or otherwise, coincide with their purpose, or find someone bearing a big name and who is at the same time so spineless as to sit through the whole process spilling out something exactly opposite of what to he believes. As a result, real experts who knows the truth are neglected, buried, silenced or in the worst case, bent. Those who appear on TV are only a mouthpiece of the behind-scenes boss. They are replaceable by anyone who can, you know, talk.

Of course a host or hostess is indispensable here. The whole group of people, made up by the representatives and an expert, are the puppets who is performing the boss's show. How do they know fully what the boss needs them to communicate to the public without a well played-out agenda? So the host person is there to guide the talk and keep it on the boss's predetermined track.

During the rehearsal, the "brain" was actively at work. They mince your original words, trimmed whatever might conflict with their purpose, and even went so far as to teach you what to tell.

When the actual show is on, they subsided and relished the outcome.

They knew, even though they evaded as well as they can, that this was not going to work - it never does, otherwise the CET problem would be solved a long long time ago.They nevertheless appeased themselves that they could at least enhance the confidence or work up the public morale.

They wanted anything but the truth. They believed as long as they did not utter the words of irreconcilable conflicts, such things just did not exist. Thus they went about their life and work with will power and relished the process of making arrangement of things of this kind- where anything is in play but the truth.

Now i understood why i led a much simpler life- i only accepted what is true. Yes, truth hurts but it hurts so good. It is a kind of sobering joy some people will never find out. In making a choice, i only asked one person- myself; and only one question- do i like to do it?

April 18, 2009

It is Not about Memory!

I dozed off the whole of the first period of the listening class. And the second period I was relatively lucid. When Ms Wang called me to answer again, she praised me for "good memory".

How many times have i said this is not about memory? What a pity you hear none of them. As a teacher you are misleading the students. And i hereby will reiterate to myself that if i can remember something better than anyone else to the extent that they began to praise my good memory, it is because i know more and deeper than that, this is too easy for me and i can easily see through it, not to say remember or analyse it.

The meaning of this awareness might not just be confined to the narrow and specific area of English Listening. It might be employed to explain anything i come across that i want to remember. I am reading the book Does the Center Hold? I really want to remember how Rene Decartes came up with the Cognito ergo sum thing. But it was really hard for me. I don't try too hard to memorize it because it will be futile. If the accounts in the book is easy for me, i would have remembered them immediately after the first sight. So what i need to work on is not to force myself memorizing them, but to understand.

But furthermore, if i can't understand them, it could be due to various reasons. First, i might not be focusing on the whole subject while reading. This also is due to the fact that i am not familiar with the words or concepts and therefore can't grasp the core of the meaning- what i manage to come by is some fuzzy image or nothing at all rather than its specific meaning. Second, i have not enough experience to refer to and ponder on. Thus my understanding or probing doesn't have enough room to exercise its power.

April 27, 2009

My Spectrum Theory

"The whole of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking."

When exactly did i started thinking i already forgot, but since i have started, i will never ever stop again. I can think about all kinds of things. And with the growing of experience in life, from reading and watching TV, the range of things i think about extends, and the depth of my meditation also grows. I think on all levels, sometimes like a child, sometimes might even be deeper than a scholar. It is a continuous spectrum. As long as i keep thinking, i will always hit some high notes, and these high points once refined, might compose a pretty good book, or let's say, blog.

Craig: "the no.1 rule in show business-promptness.""Just keeping on talking and something funny will come out."

My interpretation: the capability of people varies, but everyone don't stay on the same level all the time. I mean, David Letterman, John Leno, Steven Colbert or John Stuart, none of them, no matter how genius they are, they can't possibly keep audience laughing from the beginning to the end non-stop. They have a spectrum, and it fluctuates in between.

I can't ensure that i think everything straight and make right conclusions all the time, but i invest all my time thinking, just keep on doing that, something choice and classy will come out.

And it applies to many other aspects in my life.

April 26, 2009