Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays

Flipping through a copy of Vigny’s Journal d’un poète¹ I picked up at a secondhand bookshop, I happened across an interesting item. Vigny wrote that in French the juxtaposition of “good” and “hour” in the word for happiness (bonheur) testifies that the road to happiness is not an easy one, since happiness is but the plaything of an hour (Si le bonheur n’était qu’une bonne demie!). Considering similar expressions in Chinese, we see that their implications are equally profound and lasting. The presence of the character quick [kuai] in the words joy [kuaihuo] and happiness [kuaile], for instance, indicates the mutability of all delights with supreme clarity. So we say with a regretful sigh, “When joyful we find the night too short!”² For when a person is happy life passes too quickly, but as soon as he encounters difficulty or boredom, time seems to move painfully slowly, as if dragging a lame foot. The German word for tedium (Langeweile), translated literally, means “long while.” In Journey to the West, the little monkeys tell Traveler Sun that “a day in Heaven lasts as long as a year on earth,”³ a myth which, as it turns out, perfectly mirrors the human psyche: Heaven is a happier and more comfortable place than earth; therefore immortals live more quickly than humans, and a year on earth is equal to a single day in Heaven. To extend the analogy, since Hell is more painful than earth, life there must be even slower. Duan Chengshi writes in Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang⁴ that “three years with demons equals three days on earth.” People who complain about the brevity of life really are the “quickest living” [happiest]; conversely, people who truly “live quickly” [that is, happily] can all be said to have come to a premature end, no matter what age they expire. In this light, being an immortal is not all it’s cracked up to be either, since a person who lived a thirty-year lifespan in the mortal realm would be but a month-old child in Heaven. Nonetheless, there is an advantage to be gained yet through such “Heavenly reckoning.” Dai Fu’s Broad Collection of Anomalies,⁵ for example, records that when Adjutant Cui captured a fox-demon and “sentenced him to five blows with the peach branch,” Zhangsun Wuji complained that the fox-demon was being let off too lightly. To this Cui responded, “This is no mean punishment! Five blows in the spirit world is like five hundred in the mortal realm.”⁶ One can see from this that while it’s well and good to flaunt one’s old age or congratulate elders on their longevity on earth, punishments are best served in Heaven.

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.