After really getting stuck into The Importance of Living, I'm really happy with my choice of Lin Yutang, I think his philosophical works offer a chance for a very vivid and personal response
5 Quotes:
- "Proper moments for drinking tea: When one's heart and hands are idle, Tired after poetry, When one's thoughts are disturbed, With charming friends and slender concubines, Near famous springs and quaint rocks... Moments when one should stop drinking tea: At work, Watching a play, Opening letters, Generally conditions contrary to those enumerated in the above section... Things to be avoided: Bad water, Bad utensils, Course servants... Things to be kept away from: Damp rooms, Crying infants, Hotheaded persons"
- "The plants can live without a mouth and a stomach, and the rocks and the soil have their being without any nourishment. Why, then, must we be given a mouth and a stomach and endowed with these two extra organs?... as the fish and shell fish derive theirs from water, or the crickets and the cicada from the dew, who are all able to obtain their growth and energy this way and swim or fly or jump or sing."
- "Real progress is made possible by the proper mixture of these two ingredients, so that the clay is kept in the ideal pliable, plastic condition, half moist and half dry, not hardened and unmanageable, nor dissolving into mud... we begin to understand how we came about, and see that, instead of being made out of clay, we are sitting on top of the genealogical tree of the animal kingdom"
-Life is transiently beautiful, and it all but saves the artist and poet from escaping from life altogether. The Dreamer says 'Life is but a dream' and the Realist replies 'Quite correct. And let us live this dream as beautifully as we can'... The feeling that life is essentially but a dream, while we row, row our boats down the river in the sunset of a beautiful afternoon, that flowers cannot bloom forever, the moon waxes and wanes, and human life itself joins the eternal procession of the plant and animal worlds in being born, growing to maturity and dying to make room for others."
- "When two men separated by the ages think the same thoughts and sense the same feelings and each perfectly understands the other"
5 Motifs:
- The moon and its cycles
- Rivers, landscapes and mountains
- Flowers and pots (orchids in particular)
- Ecosystem and circle of life
- Seeing through others eyes
5 Characters/appearances:
- "a wife who does not know how to buy fresh food or a man who is willing to put up with cold storage foods"
- "Every mouse steals- and he is not the less moral or more immoral for stealing- every dog barks, every cat doesn't come home at night... Every lion kills, every horse runs away at the sight of danger, every tortoise sleeps the best hours of the day away, and every insect, reptile, bird and beast reproduces its kind in public. Now in terms of civilisation, every mouse is a thief, every dog makes too much noise, every cat is an unfaithful husband, every lion or tiger a murderer, every horse a coward, every tortoise a lazy louse, and finally, every insect, reptile, bird and beast is obscene... And that is the reason why we sit back and wonder how the Lord made us so imperfect."
- "Perhaps it is the safety razor that has done it, a process as deplorable and ignorant and stupid as the deforestation of the Chinese hills by ignorant farmers, who have deprived North China of its beautiful forests and left the hills as bald and ugly as the American old men's chins.
- "For if we love a woman, we do not love her geometrical precision of features, but rather her ways and gestures in motion, her looks and smiles. But are a woman's looks and smiles physical or spiritual? No one can say"
- "All herbivorous animals are peaceful by nature: the lamb, the horse, the cow, the elephant, the sparrow, etc; all carnivorous animals are fighters: the wolf, the lion, the tiger, the hawk etc."
5 Locations:
-"When a man is sitting in the boat, the light of the lake and color of the hills, the temples, clouds, haze, bamboos, trees on the banks... is a living and moving picture, changing all the time, not only when the boat is moving, giving us a new sight with every movement of the oar... when the wind moves and the water ripples, changing its form t every movement"
-"Rich men in Shanghai very proud of a tiny plot of land that they own, which includes a fish pond about ten feet across and an artificial hill that takes ants three minutes to crawl to the top..."
-"... Not knowing that many a poor man lives in a hut on a mountain side and owns the entire view of the hillside, the river and the lake as his private garden"
- "Every time I see a city skyline or look over a stretch of roofs, I get frightened. It is positively amazing. Two or three water towers, the backs of two or three steel frames for billboards, perhaps a spire or two, and a stretch of asphalt roofing material and bricks going up in square, sharp, vertical outlines without any form or order, sprinkled with some dirty discolored chimneys and a few wash-lines and criss-cross lines of radio aerials"
- "mountains, rivers, and everything that reached a grand old age. The winds and thunder were spirits themselves; each of the great mountains and each river was ruled by a spirit who practically owned it; each kind of flower had a fairy in heaven attending to its seasons and its welfare, and there was a Queen of All Flowers whose birthday came on the twelfth day of the second moon; every willow tree, pine tree, cypress, fox or turtle that reached a grand old age, say over a few hundred years, acquired by that very fact immortality and became a 'genius'"
5 Pieces of information about Yutang:
- Chinese name 林語堂
- Talks mainly about differences in culture and people- invented the first chinese typewriter- Translator and mediator of cultures and languages
- Considered himself a 'child of the mountains'
- Put huge emphasis on seeing things how others do and how equal all beings are
- Lived from 1895-1976
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