The expression “eternal happiness” is not merely so vague that it can never be realized; it’s so absurd as to be completely untenable. That which passes quickly can never endure. To speak of “eternal happiness” is as self-contradictory as to talk about a square circle or static movement.7 When we are happy life picks up speed and becomes slippery. Like Dr. Faustus, we call out in vain to time that vanishes in the blink of an eye: “Linger a while! So fair thou art!”8 What’s the point in that? If it’s eternity you want, best look for it in pain. Leave the rest aside: a sleepless night, an afternoon date that never shows, or a tedious lecture will let one taste “eternal life” better than any religious faith. This is life’s great irony: the things that refuse to depart quickly are invariably those one cherishes the least.
Happiness in life is like the sugar cube that entices the child to take his medicine, and even more so like the electric rabbit that lures dogs around the racetrack. For a few short minutes or days of happiness we endure a lifetime of suffering. We long for happiness to come, long for it to stay, and long for it to come again—these three phrases sum up the history of mankind’s endeavors. As we pursue happiness or await its arrival, life slips by unnoticed. Perhaps we are no more than tickers counting the passage of time. Perhaps to live a lifetime is but to serve as a funerary object for the years of that lifetime without any prospect of happiness. But to the day we die we don’t realize that we’ve been duped. We still harbor the ideal that after death there is a Heaven where—praise the Lord for that day!—we will finally enjoy eternal happiness. So you see, the lure of happiness is not merely like the electric rabbit or the sugar cube in making us endure life; it is also like bait on a fishhook in that it lets us die willingly. Put this way, life may be painful but it is not pessimistic, since it always harbors hope of future happiness. To pay our current debts we mortgage ourselves to future payments. For happiness, we are even willing to die a slow death.
John Stuart Mill likened “Socrates on the rack” to “a pig content.”9 If a pig can truly know joy, then a pig is little different than Socrates. While we don’t know whether a pig can be as content as a human, we have abundant proof of how easily a human can be as happy as a pig. The most muddleheaded way to analyze happiness is to differentiate between the corporeal and the spiritual. All joy is spiritual, even when it’s caused by the physical stimulation of the body. When a child is born, he drinks his fill of milk and obediently falls asleep not knowing what joy is, even though his body feels comfortable. The explanation for this phenomenon is that the child’s mind and body are not yet differentiated and remain in an innocent, nebulous state. Should you feel happy taking a bath, looking at a flower, or eating a meal, it is not simply because the bath gets you clean, the flower blooms prettily, or the flavor of the food tickles your taste buds. In large part it is because your heart is unfettered and your soul is relaxed enough to focus on enjoying the corporeal sensation. Should you be unhappy, it will be like being at a farewell banquet: no matter how well the food was cooked, to you it will smell and taste like mud. At such times the soul is like the eyes of a sick patient that fear the sunlight or an open wound that fears contact with the air, even though air and sunlight are both good things. When one is happy, one becomes impervious to shame. Should you commit a crime but be genuinely happy, you will feel as carefree as people of morality and refinement, no matter whether your conscience is clean, nonexistent, or pitch-black.10
When we discover that happiness is determined by the spirit, human culture will take another step forward. Equally important to the acceptance of this principle will be the discovery that right and wrong and good and evil are determined by justice rather than violence. When we discover justice, no longer will any people in the world be able to be conquered solely by military force. When we discover that the spirit is the locus of all happiness, we will no longer be intimidated by the prospect of suffering and the dictatorship of the body will lessen. The alchemy of the spirit is able to transform corporeal suffering into the stuff of happiness. Thus, some people celebrate when their house burns down; some find happiness with just a bowl of rice and something to drink; and some carry on nonchalantly telling jokes through endless calamities. Thus, as we said before, though life may not be happy it can still be lived optimistically. Writers from Solomon, who wrote the Nevi’im, to Mallarmé, author of “Brise marine,” for instance, all believed that the sufferings of civilized man were attributable to his physical fatigue.11 Yet some people are able to make merry despite a bitter life and filter happiness out of their ailments as a sort of compensation for their loss of health. One of Su Dongpo’s poems reads, “When you’re sick you gain leisure, and that’s not that bad / There is no better remedy than a mind at ease.”12 Similarly, Wang Danlu’s A “New Tales of This Age” for Today13 records that Mao Zhihuang was often ill, and that when people worried about this, Mao remarked, “The flavor of illness is fine indeed / But it is difficult to convey this to the healthy and restless!” In the sports-loving Western world we can find people with a similarly detached point of view. In Fragmente, the hypochondriac Novalis inaugurated something of a philosophy of illness, suggesting that illness was “a schoolmarm who teaches us how to rest.”14 Rodenbach’s poetry anthology Les vies encloses includes a section dedicated to extolling illness as “cleansing of the soul (épuration).”15 By adopting this point of view, people whose bodies are in good health and enjoy staying active will feel that ailments have their own distinctive flavor. The first time the stubborn eighteenth-century German poet B. H. Brockes fell ill he felt it was “an astonishing discovery” (eine bewunderungswürdige Erfindung).16 What threat could life pose to such a man? This sort of happiness that transforms suffering into enjoyment is a great victory of mind over matter since it affords the soul its own autonomy. Then again, this may also be self-deception. A man who is able to maintain such an attitude is of course a great philosopher, but who knows—he may also be a great fool.
Yes, there is a contradiction here, but contradictions are the price of wisdom. This is life’s big joke on philosophies of life.
ON LAUGHTER
Since humor literature came to be promoted, “selling laughter”1 has become a profession for men of letters.2 Humor is, of course, vented by means of laughter, but laughter does not necessarily indicate a sense of humor. Liu Jizhuang’s Guangyang Notes states, “The donkey’s bray sounds like crying; the horse’s whinny sounds like laughter.”3 Yet the horse is not celebrated as a great humorist—likely because he has a long face. In truth, most people’s laughter is akin to the horse’s whinny and cannot be considered humorous.
Aristotle appears to have been the first person to use humor to distinguish man and beast.4 In The History of Animals [sic] he states, “Man is the only animal able to laugh.” The gist of the modern genius W. S. Blunt’s sonnet “Laughter and Death” is that the natural world of birds and beasts has a fitting sound to express every emotion—joy, anger, love, and fear—but lacks only laughter to denote humorousness.5 Nevertheless, if we hold that laughter is an expression of humor, then laughter must be regarded as nothing more than a waste product or luxury good, since not all of mankind has a need to laugh. The cries of birds and beasts would be sufficient to convey the average man’s emotions: when angry he roars like a lion; when sad he howls like an ape; when arguing he croaks like a frog; when he encounters his enemy he barks like a dog that’s seen its shadow; and when he spies his lover he starts cooing like a turtledove. How many people who truly possess a sense of humor, we may well ask, need laughter to express it? Moreover, the Creator distributed the ability to laugh evenly throughout humanity—every person’s face can smile and throat emit laughter.6 To have this inborn talent but not use it would be a pity indeed. Thus, most people laugh not because they are humorous, but in fact because they have the capacity to laugh and use laughter to cover up their lack of a sense of humor. Thus, laughter gradually lost its former purpose: what originally signified an abundance of
humor slowly became a cover for a dearth of humor. Hence, we have the idiot’s dull-witted laugh, the blind man’s naughty and mischievous laugh—as well as the recent vogue of “humor literature.”
A smile is the quickest and most fluid of expressions, spreading from the eyes to the corners of the mouth. “The Eastern Wasteland” section of Dongfang Shuo’s The Classic of the Divine and the Strange records that when Duke Dongwang lost in a game of dice, “Heaven smiled at him.”7 Zhang Hua’s annotation that lightning is Heaven smiling was truly inspired. According to Lady Holland’s A Memoir of the Reverend Sidney Smith, Sidney Smith once remarked that “lightning is Heaven’s wit.” The smile could indeed be said to be lightning on the human face: the eyes suddenly light up and the teeth flash through parted lips. Just as lightning cannot be captured and substituted for the sun and moon that hang on high and shine upon all, neither can a smile be turned into a fixed, collective expression. As a promoted product, humor is inescapably artificial. Such a mechanical smile is akin only to the bared teeth of a skull—not nearly as agile as in a living person. In Le rire, Henri Bergson writes that everything laughable arises from something flexible becoming stiff and awkward, from the “mechanical encrusted on the living” (le mécanique plaque sur le vivant).8 This is why repetitive, monotonous speech patterns and movements, such as stuttering, clichés, and children’s mimicry of adults provoke laughter. Old people tend to be funnier than young people because they can’t move as nimbly and are full of ossified habits. Humor cannot be promoted for the same reason. The moment it is promoted, the natural turns into affect, and the mercurial transforms into rigidity. Such humor is itself fodder for humor; such laughter is itself laughable. A man with a genuine sense of humor possesses a particular type of understanding. He laughs merrily, smiles calmly, and breathes a breath of fresh air into life’s dreariness. Perhaps only hundreds of years and tens of thousands of miles hence will he find a kindred spirit, standing on the opposite bank of time and space, who smiles back. A large crowd of people choosing the same moment to open their mouths and relax their throats in a merry group laugh is the type of chain reaction that can only be generated by some vulgar traveling vaudeville show. If promoting domestic goods results in more bogus brands, humor is even less suited to mass production. Instead of generating humorists, the promotion of humor has multiplied only the number of clowns playing with brush and ink. The clown’s social status, of course, rises dramatically as he muddles his way from the theatrical stage to the literary stage under the banner of humor. Nevertheless, humor’s quality deteriorates when the clown turns it into a bogus brand, and most literary art of this sort must be regarded as little more than “entertainment art.” A clown can make us laugh, to be sure, but he is completely unlike a person with a genuine sense of humor. When a person endowed with a genuine sense of humor laughs, we laugh with him, while a clown feigning humorousness is laughable, and we laugh at him. The clown makes us laugh not because he possesses a sense of humor, but because we ourselves do.
Thus, humor is at most a sensibility. It most certainly cannot be branded as a doctrine, and it is even less well suited to being a profession. We must recall that the original Latin meaning of humor is “fluid.” Put another way, humor, like woman in the eyes of Jia Baoyu, is made of water.9 To turn humor into a doctrine or a means of livelihood is to congeal a liquid into a solid, to transform a living thing into an artifact. When someone possessed of a genuine sense of humor starts selling laughter as his means of livelihood—Mark Twain, for instance—his works will no longer be worth reading. Since the end of the eighteenth century, Germans have loved to discourse on humor, but the more they’ve said, the less relevant the discussion has been to its ostensible topic. This is because the Germans are a sausage-making people who mistakenly believe that humor is like ground meat and can be wrapped up into tidy parcels of ready-made spiritual nourishment.10 Humor lessens life’s seriousness and by no means takes itself seriously. True humor can laugh at itself. It not only has a humorous view of human life, it has a humorous view of humor itself. Promoting humor as a slogan or a standard is a gesture bereft of humor. This is not humor but its earnest avocation, laughter pried from a solemn countenance. Again, we are reminded of the horse’s whinny! It may indeed sound like laughter, but the horse’s face is still without a trace of a smile, and is as long as that of a surviving friend of the deceased at a memorial gathering, or of a master of the advanced sort at the lecture podium.11
Generally speaking, people have one of two motivations for pretending to be something they’re not. Some do so out of respect, such as an uncouth person who respects art and collects antiques in order to pose as a man of culture and refinement. Some do so for profit, like the scoundrel who passes himself off as an upright man by invoking religion and morality. Humor, presumably, is usually appropriated for one of these two purposes. In the long run, however, bogus goods cannot pass as the real thing. Westerners call bright and uplifting laughter “silvery laughter.”12 Fake humor gives forth the dull clunk of a leaden slug and can only be considered leaden laughter. Then again, it could be that “silvery laughter” means to profit from selling laughter or to laugh for silver, akin to the old saying “in books there are roomfuls of gold.”13 I’ll stop here for the time being and leave this sampling for the reference of lexicographers.
EATING
“Eating rice”1 is sometimes just like getting married. What is in name the most important thing often ends up being just a subsidiary consideration. When properly “eating rice” we in fact eat vegetable and meat dishes, just as when someone pursues the daughter of a rich old man, his primary object is not the girl! This type of lateral shift in perception involves a roundabout and rather complicated worldview. Savoring flavors rather than satisfying hunger becomes the real purpose of “eating rice” for us. The tongue replaces the belly as the ultimate or highest arbiter. Nevertheless, we persist in camouflaging enjoyment as need. We do not say we are “eating vegetable and meat dishes” but rather say we are “eating rice.”2 It is like when we study philosophy or art, we always claim that the truth or beauty we find in them has utility. Things that have utility may, of course, be used by people for their benefit, and so be preserved and protected. Things without utility, conversely, find ways of using people to cover up or construct apologies for them so that they can avoid being discarded. Plato’s Republic divides the nation into three levels of people corresponding to the three components of the soul. The desires of the senses—hunger and thirst, eating and drinking—are the soul’s basest components, akin to the commoners or the masses in a political organization. The clever politician knows how to do just enough to satisfy the masses while dressing up his ambition as the will and welfare of the masses. Inviting a guest to a meal at a restaurant on the pretext of eating is an excuse the tongue makes to the stomach, as if to say, “Don’t complain, there’s something in it for you too! I do the work and you get the credit—what do I still owe you?” In fact, Heaven knows—a belly shrunken from hunger knows even better—that if filling the stomach is one’s sole purpose, tree bark and grass roots differ little from chicken, duck, fish, and pork! Who could have imagined that the humble biological processes of digestion and excretion would necessitate so much political maneuvering?
The Roman poet Persius3 once exclaimed that the belly was the “Master of Arts and Dispenser of Genius” (Magister artisingeni que largitor venter [sic]). Rabelais elaborated on this point in detail. Volume three [sic] of Gargantua and Pantagruel contains a chapter in praise of the belly, which it esteems as mankind’s true master, the originator and promoter of all manners of human knowledge and vocation. It goes so far as to say that the flying of birds, the running of animals, the swimming of fishes, the creeping of insects, and the hustle and bustle of all living things are “all for their innards” (et tout pour la tripe).4 All of man’s creations and activities (including essay writing) indicate not only the richness of the brain but also the emptiness of the stoma
ch. A full stomach is good for nothing, and it turns the brain to jelly, making it good only for dreaming silly dreams. These two have an unwritten agreement, as powerfully evidenced by the postlunch siesta. We unfairly despise hunger, saying it produces only beggars, thieves, prostitutes, and the like, while forgetting that it has also inspired thought, skill, and the political and economic theory that “when there is food, it is for all to share.” In an earlier time, the German poet B. H. Brockes wrote a poetic encomium likening God to “a great chef” (der gross Speisemeister [sic]) who cooks food for all of humanity to eat, but this view inescapably betrays some religious childishness.5 The people who provide the food we eat are certainly not our true masters. No point in being that kind of God! Only those who have others to cook for them have the ability to control our actions. The master of the house, for instance, is not in fact the father who earns money to support the family but the newly weaned child sitting and eating contentedly. This fact, needless to say, goes unappreciated in childhood and is one that fathers would surely be unwilling to concede. Rabelais has a good point. Think about it: if the belly—to which we make offerings of tea and food from dawn to dusk—is not God, then what is it? In the final analysis, however, it is a lowly thing that only has the capacity to ingest and lacks enjoyment and appreciation. This is where life becomes complicated. On the one hand, there are people looking for food to fill their bellies, while on the other there are people who have food but lack appetite. The worldview of the first type of person might be called rice eating, while that of the second might well be called dish eating. The first type of person works, produces, and creates in exchange for food to eat. The second type uses the fruits of the first type’s activities to strengthen his disposition and whet his appetite, to help him eat and expand his eating capacity. Thus, it is not enough for us to have music when we eat—we must have “beauties” and “lovelies” to press us with wine.6 When we want to be even more refined we throw parties to pass the season or admire calligraphy and famous paintings at banquets. Even when admiring flowers or going on excursions to the mountains, we are treating famous scenic spots as accompaniments to our meal. Naturally, we insist that the dishes be the very finest. In an environment of such material abundance, the tongue imitates the body: once exceedingly wanton, it now becomes chaste and upright. Many things that it was used to eating it now absolutely refuses to allow to enter its mouth, as if eating them would sully its purity. One would expect that, being so meticulous, the tongue would eat less, but in fact it eats more. If the belly were the decision maker, it would have the propriety to stop when full. But the tongue wantonly selects the choicest and fattiest morsels for the greedy and reckless mouth. The stomach is consequently left to bear the burden and can only envy the mouth, while the tongue, as Lu Zhishen put it, “feels birdy bland.”7 Retribution for excessive greed! From this perspective, the dish-eating worldview seems a bit improper.
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