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LIVING IN BETWEEN PRESENT AND PAST ──Monologue by Chen Mo,the host of Yun Xian Ge study | ||
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| Often, I could hardly realize whom I am and where I truly belong to. I have been long obsessed by such feelings, which is far beyond my capability to tell why. While telecommunication brags of having made it possible to bring together people from far away, I implicitly regretted for the absence of traditional pleasing experience of visiting an intimate friend by walking through picturesque spring scenery or chilly winter snow and “replacing good wine with plain tea at freezing night”. I believe stubbornly that any means of modern communication will fail to convey inter-personal care and love as was made tangible by simply sitting together face to face. I do doubt there will ever be such high-tech as to express on a phone call or even on screen, the vague fresh tea fragrance and the leisurely atmosphere of a free talk. While computer could print at our command, series of standard and stereotyped Chinese characters, I feel sorrowful for the fading of hand written characters as fluent and smooth as Huai-su’s rapid and cursive style draft, which appears like a horse galloping in the vacant space. I believe stubbornly, that ever since its invention by our ancestors, Chinese characters would have no soul unless hand written with slim calligraphy brush, black ink and slightly yellow Xuan paper. Only when hand written or engraved, they begin to be awakened to life and activated to run or stroll, to sing or remain taciturn. Chinese characters were born to facilitate its writer to express his or her true feelings and moods, as well as enabling fine and keen reader to grasp the writers’ techniques, artistic and even moral accomplishments. For this reason, there was the historic legend of “Dong-chuang” about Wang-xizhi, and the traditional saying as “ Sighting hand-written Characters is sighting its writer” While paper money becomes more and more attractive than the paper cultural relics of Huang dao-zhou, while our children intend to believe that priced refined-water is definitely cleaner and healthier than mountainous spring in open air, while metropolitan consumers trust that caned tea is surely superior to the fresh, while more and more social elite prefer well polished leather shoes to clothe ones hand made by our dear mothers, and while I have grown up old enough to understand the delighted and joyous hearts of our ancient writers who uttered “taxation of writing and painting is imposed on ink-slab”, and “to pile up enough cloud will make you a celestial being ”, I truly grieve and feel pitiful on my contemporaries, but more on myself ! Was I given birth to wrong times? Or rather, Is this existing “I” a mere resuscitation of past living being? Hence, I take my present existence as a temporary trip to an exotic place.
Hence, in the midst of sky-high concrete buildings I
search for means to keep myself alive , and through countless sleepless
nights, I indulge myself in the moonlight and forest breeze from outside
the windows, trying to understand what was meant by the writers and
painters from the relics that I have been left with, to approach wisdom of
life……
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