Prejudice can be said to be a vacation from thinking.
1 For the unthinking man it is a daily necessity, while for the thinking man it is a Sunday amusement. If we were unable to harbor prejudices and always had to be objective, fair, upright, and serious, it would be like building a house with a living room but no bedroom, or being obliged to strike photogenic poses in front of the bathroom mirror. In canto 27 of Dante’s
Inferno, the Devil is quoted as remarking: “Maybe thou didst not consider that I was a logician!”
2 From this one can see that Hell was made for the reasonable sort, and that in the current age it is completely unnecessary to focus one’s words and deeds solely on the pursuit of rationality. Of course, “correctness” and “common sense” are basically also prejudices. The fundamentals of biology hold that the position of the human heart is not actually in the center, but slightly to one side—and, most fashionable of all, it inclines slightly to the left. It appears that the ancients’ referring to the deviant path as the “left path” has some scientific basis. That said, many opinions nevertheless retain what the Zen sect calls “inclination to the central and upright”—academic theories, for example. Only jottings in the margins of life,
3 love letters written in the throes of passion, and the like are honest-to-goodness, out-and-out prejudices.
The world is too vast. We face it squarely with our eyes wide open, but our field of vision is still pitifully narrow. When a dog has its eyes fixed on a meaty bone, does it ever notice the other dog at its side? What we commonly refer to as prejudice is best likened to using one eye to take aim at a target. Some people actually believe this is the way to see the true core of things. Plato, for instance, defined mankind as “a featherless biped.” Objective in the extreme! But according to Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers (volume 6, chapter 2), Plato found himself being cross-examined by a man carrying a plucked chicken. The fool in Beaumarchais’ Le Mariage de Figaro declares that “man is that animal which drinks without thirst and is lustful year-round.” We know perfectly well that this is the jest of a wine-loving, womanizing clown, but we must still admit that this novel theory exposes a fundamental part of human nature. The characters ‘partial’ [pian] and ‘stimulate’ [ji] that make up the word ‘extreme’ [pianji] are related to begin with, since our views become especially partial when we are stimulated. Perhaps we could say that “man is the animal that makes noise whether day or night, winter or summer.” And why not, after all?
Birds twitter in spring, crickets chirp in autumn, and mosquitoes gather before thunderstorms in the summer.
4 At night insects awake and birds sleep. Not every day sees wind and rain. The dog does not bark unless someone comes, nor does the hen cluck unless it has laid. Man is alone in that, whenever and wherever he is, he makes noise with speech, movement, and machinery. Even when he is alone in a room without someone to banter with, he can turn on the phonograph or listen to the wireless. Even while sleeping he emits thunderous snores. Speech is more than mere sound, of course. But when speech is not worth listening to, or should we not care to listen to it, or if we cannot hear it clearly due to distance or obstruction, the words lose their edges and contours and turn into a ball of undulating racket that is as meaningless as a chicken’s clucking or a dog’s barking. Such is the so-called “piping of man!”
5 It ruins sleep, shatters thought, and induces neurasthenia.
This world is, after all, ruled by humans. The human voice overcomes all. The myriad voices of Mother Nature combined cannot stand up to the hubbub of two people talking at the same time, at least as it sounds to the ears of a third person. The famous line in Tang Zixi’s poem “Drunken Sleep” [Zui mian], “the mountains are as still as in ancient times,” no doubt refers to the age of high antiquity, before humans appeared.
6 Otherwise, the mountain would have a monk living on top, tourists arriving at its base, and restaurants and tea shops open for business midway up its slopes. Tranquillity would be impossible. The piping of man is a mortal wound to silence, while the piping of Heaven can melt into one with silence. The sounds of wind and waves are to silence as the wind is to the air and the waves to the sea. These are but two examples. Each day at the east’s first light we awaken from our dreams, still groggy, to the sound of innumerable birds welcoming the dawn. At this time, before night has completely disappeared, silence still lingers, harboring unfinished dreams. The chirping of countless sparrows adds to a cacophony that seems ready to peck through the silence. The call of the magpie, clear and sharp as a pair of scissors, and of the stork, slow and grating as a saw, both try to cut a hole in the silence with each cry. But the silence seems too plentiful, too fluid and elastic. No sooner has its surface been broken by a birdcall then silence fills back in. Nor does the rooster’s ringing, melodious morning report leave any trace. Gradually, we forget that the twittering of birds is breaking the silence, as if silence had already absorbed and digested the bird chirps and turned them into a sort of silence with sound. At such a moment, the mere sound of a neighbor’s crying child, the coughing of a person sleeping upstairs, or the footsteps of an early-morning walker outside is enough to make the silence, like nighttime mist encountering morning sunlight, break apart and scatter completely. Once the piping of man begins and humans resume their affairs, don’t hope for any more peace and quiet. When, late some weary night or deep in meditation, one suddenly hears the racket of the piping of man, even the most compassionate humanist might momentarily be seized with murderous thoughts and lament that he can’t shut the person up so as to keep his ears free of worldly discord and preserve his peace of mind. Birds, beasts, wind, waves, and all the other pipings of Heaven can peacefully coexist with silence, as the ancient poets who appreciated the true nature of things realized long ago. In the
Book of Odes, the line “As if at ease, the horses neighed / Long and slow fluttered the pennants and banners”
7 is subsequently glossed as “noise without clamor.” Evidently, if a horse whinnies but no man shouts, it won’t create a din.
Family Instructions of Master Yan also points out that Wang Ji’s famous line “Cicadas chirp, the grove turns quieter still / Birds sing, the mountain grows more remote” precisely captures the sense of “noise without clamor.”
8 The chirping of insects and singing of birds actually add to the stillness. Shelley’s poem “To Jane: A Recollection” [
sic] describes the woodpecker by saying that when the bird pecks the mountain grows more remote.
9 Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Æolian Harp” reads: “The stilly murmur of the distant Sea / Tells us of silence.” Should this sea be a sea of people, the poet would assuredly go deaf and suffer a headache. Thus, though we often liken the din of human voices to “the calls of crows and sparrows,” this is a misrepresentation that displays a certain degree of bias toward humanity. For us to always liken the sound of a group of women chatting and laughing to “orioles trilling and swallows twittering,” however, is tantamount to an insult to the bird kingdom.
Silence is not the complete absence of sound. The complete absence of sound is death, not silence. That’s why Dante said that in Hell even the sun “in silence rests” (
dove il sole tace).
10 Silence can be likened to auditory transparency, just as effulgence can be said to be visual quietude. Silence lets people hear noises they wouldn’t ordinarily hear. It lets philosophers hear the “still small voice” of the conscience and enables poets to hear faint sounds such as the stealthy onset of dusk or the sprouting of grasses.
11 The more noise one hears, the harder it becomes to hear clearly. Humans alone are fond of making such a racket, so much so that when a group of people gathers together without making noise it seems unnatural. The five minutes of silence before the start of a meeting, or long-lost relatives or friends meeting again and holding hands wordlessly are but two examples. This type of silence is like pregnancy—full of latent sound waiting to be emitted.
The piping of man is also frightening in one respect. Traffic may be noisy, but it occurs on the same plane as you, so it only disrupts your immediate environment. Only man will target his racket at your head from above. Let’s say, for example, that you live one floor below an upstairs neighbor. Leave the rest aside: the sound of a few footsteps will be enough to make you feel that someone is stomping on your head like Concubine Zhao in
Dream of the Red Chamber. When you can’t tolerate it any longer, you will be seized by two great desires. First, you will hope that you, living downstairs, will transform into what
The Classic of Mountains and Seas calls “a commoner who punishes Heaven,”
12 with your head growing on your torso. This way, your head will be unlikely to bear the brunt
13 of being trampled upon by your upstairs neighbors’ shoes. Second, you will hope that your neighbor will transform into something like a Christian angel, with a body that stops at the waist and two wings growing out of its back that obviate the need for legs and feet.
14 Your intentions are so benevolent. You don’t wish your upstairs neighbor to suffer Sun Bin’s fate of having his feet chopped off, even though your neighbor has given no consideration to your head or to your being what Rodenbach called “a soul hurt by clamor.”
15Noise and heat, silence and cold are mutually interconnected. This is why in the wretched darkness of Hell even the sun imparts a feeling of desolation. This is also why a cacophony of human voices can turn a cold room into a hot pot, making one’s entire body fidgety. Schopenhauer has a good point when he says, in section 278 [
sic] of
Parerga und Paralipomena, that a thinker should be deaf.
16 If he isn’t deaf, he will hear sounds, and if those sounds are noisy, he’ll have a hard time keeping his mind collected, with the result that prejudice will take the place of impartiality. At this point—having forgotten that you too are a noise-making animal; that you too have stomped on the heads of people living downstairs; and that your own bawling has prevented people next door from thinking or sleeping—you will find yourself even more impervious to others’ complaints that your prejudices are too ingrained. As you add this new prejudice, you make another note in the margins of life.
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