He was seeking a lost innocence and settings made for enjoyment and ease, but where one could never be happy again.
Without fully realizing it, I began writing my first book. It was neither a vocation nor a particular gift that pushed me to write, but quite simply the enigma posed by a man I had no chance of finding again, and by all those questions that would never have an answer.
On the sidewalk, dead leaves. Or burned pages from an old Gaffiot dictionary. It’s the neighborhood of colleges and convents.
Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that's turning running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind.
-Alan and Marilyn Bergman, 1968
I reached Rue d'Ulm. It was deserted. Though I kept telling myself that there was nothing unusual about that on a Sunday evening in this studious provincial neighborhood, I wondered whether I was still in Paris. In front of me, the dome of the Pantheon It frightened me to be there alone, at the foot of that funereal monument in the moonlight and I veered off into Rue Lhomond.
At that moment a phenomenon occurred for which I'm still trying to find an explanation.... Little by little, that man melted into the wall. Or else the rain... falling on him so heavily, had dissolved him....He had vanished in that sudden way that I'd later notice in other people...which leaves you so puzzled...you have no choice but to look for proofs and clues to convince yourself these people had really existed.
If a tree falls in the forest and it hits a mime, would he make a noise?
Faith keeps you going, but doubt keeps you from going off the deep end.
Real wisdom is the ability to understand the incredible extent to which you bullshit yourself every single moment of every day.
The word dharma can be a kind of catchall word in Buddhism. Dharma sometimes means the Buddha’s teachings specifically. But here the meaning is much wider. It’s almost like saying “stuff.” Dharmas could be stuff you’re going through — studying for your midterms, getting a divorce, making an egg-salad sandwich. Or it could be the people and things that are going through whatever it is they’re going through. The phrase “all dharmas” means the whole universe.
This crappy, mean, broken-down school took five years of my life. I’d be mad, but for the fact that it taught me more about who I was than anything else I have ever done. It also made me think that modern life is rubbish for so many people. How few choices it gives them. How it lays out in front of them a future that bores most of them so much they can’t wait to get smashed out of their heads each weekend. How little most people are believed in, and how much it asks of so many people for so little in return.
The only way out was to go back the next year and buy his sheep and pay over the odds to make up for it, so he did. Neither of these men cared remotely about “maximizing profit” in the short-term in the way a modern business person in a city would; they both valued their good names and their reputations for integrity far more highly than making a quick buck. If you said you would do a thing, you’d better do it.
And then we do it all again, just as our forefathers did before us. It is a farming pattern, fundamentally unchanged from many centuries ago. It has changed in scale (as farms have amalgamated to survive, so there are fewer us of ) but not in its basic content. You could bring a Viking man to stand on our fell with me and he would understand what we were doing and the basic pattern of our farming year. The timing of each task varies depending on the different valleys and farms. Things are driven by the seasons and necessity, but not our will.
As writers have long noted, it is an intimate landscape on a human scale. Whitewashed farmhouses hug the fell sides just beneath the ancient common land of the fells. Other farmsteads dot the valley floor on higher ground, or riggs, that rise from the rushes of the sodden land in the valley bottom, including the one where my grandfather lived. We are one of maybe 300 farming families who sustain this landscape and its ancient way of life.
Later I would understand that modern industrial communities are obsessed with the importance of ‘going somewhere’ and ‘doing something with your life’. The implication is an idea I have come to hate, that staying local and doing physical work doesn’t count for much.
It is a curious thing to slowly discover that your landscape is loved by other people. It is even more curious, and a little unsettling, when you discover by stages that you as a native are not really part of the story and meaning they attach to that place.
There is nothing that is more hopeless in this world than the so-called South-western regional bus station in Nanjing on 5 May 2002, shortly before seven o'clock in the drizzling rain and the unspeakably icy wind...
What has occurred is that in those places where in principle there still might be some trace of classical culture -- subordinated in the course of reconstruction to the inferior values of the tourist industry -- he, Stein, has come upon monuments almost everywhere essentially destroyed: instead of something real, he saw forgeries, instead of truth, he took part in deception, and it's as if he still could really speak of the reasons for his disillusionment.
At one time, according to the descriptions, the accounts, and the drawings, the temples here were magnificent, and although only a fragment of the buildings still stand today, and -- looking at them from far -- still in probably the best of conditions, as they come closer, and walk by all of them, and once again are confronted with the infinite damage done by the system of reconstruction in the new China, the monstrosity of crudely vulgar taste, the implacable lack of understanding, and the plethora of ignoble results, so radically at odds with the refined sensibilities the authentic Chinese spirit, more and more they fall into a kind of enraged despair, which then is transformed into the deepest repugnance [.....] (T)hey are not viewing Jiangtian, but rather they have been dropped into a safari park, where nothing is real, where everything has to be paid for, it turns out that here every building is new and fake, and every louhan, every so-called Buddha and every Bodhisattva is new and fake, and every wood join in every column and every centimetre of golden paint is brand-new and fake, so accordingly the whole thing is fraudulent.
And he is appalled by what is going on so often in these temples and monasteries. Everything reeks from money. High entrance fees are collected -- entrance fees ! at the gates, impossible things are for sale, fake rubbish, the meanest religious kitsch, the faithful are made to throw money into the collection box, and in the evening they spill it out, and count it up nicely and accurately, they count up the takings ... ! And these are not simply vendors, but monks ... ! Venerable abbot, László Stein involuntarily lowers his head, this is so sad.
In today's world, the connection between tradition and everyday life has been shattered.
Not only on 5 May 2002 is Nanjing hopeless, Nanjing is always hopeless, because there is nothing, really nothing that is more hopeless than Nanjing.
I noticed a young guy with a shaved head and Adorno glasses, not least because he had a copy of Ole Robert Sunde’s Of Course She Had to Ring on the desk in front of him. This was a statement and a signal, a code for the initiated, of whom there were not many, and therefore particularly significant. He read Sunde, he had to be a writer himself.
It was a fantastic feeling. I had spent ten years writing without achieving anything, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it was just flowing. And what I wrote was of such quality, compared with what I had produced earlier, that I was surprised every evening when I read through what I had written the night before. It was like having a head rush, or walking in your sleep, a state in which you are out of yourself, and what was curious about this particular experience was that it continued unabated.
