good novel: a mirror of life?

[donq]

Hi everyone,

Today I think of book’s preface I read so many years ago. It was a book about Chinese martial arts novel, written by Gu long. His writing style was unique that relied on the idiosyncrasies of human life with razor-sharp wit, poetic philosophies and mysterious plots. I did like all of his works.

I’ll try to translate it for you here. Please bear with my English.

It was very late at night and so quiet. You woke up and found that the person who was sleeping beside you was a completely stranger. Have you ever tasted that feeling?

After everyone gave you a big applaud and praises, you came home and sitting alone in the dark, by the window, only waiting for the dawn. Have your mind ever felt that way?

This night you were so happy and successful in everything but you have no idea where will you be tomorrow. Don’t know even where you will get drunk the next night!

Willow’s twigs are dancing slowly and gracefully.
The dawn’s soft breeze leisurely caresses the moon that still lingers in the sky.
Though it is scenically stunning
but also such a cold and disconsolate scene that can squeeze your heart, isn’t it?
Will you welcome that kind of joyfulness?

If you always get whatever you want, then what will still be worth searching left for you?
Who knows such a loneliness?
I know!

I know because I am also one of those among the characters I wrote. I am also a wanderer without any root…

What I write is about the happiness and painfulness of my characters. I hope it might be a mirror for you to see what you might want to do in such and such situations. My characters are still loveable as they dare to love and hate; dare to cry and laugh, because they always hold on to their moral principles valiantly.
Life is still loveable!
When we still are alive, we should know how to enjoy it; knowing how to find happiness in it. When our faces are stained with some dust, we need some mirror to see it first before shedding it off our faces, right? I just hope this mirror might be able to do that little task, helping you shedding the dust of life away. I sincerely wish each and very life would come to be happy again.

P.S. Somehow I would like to say "Amen" after reading his words.

[donq]

I believe that a good novel is really a mirror for us. For example, I found that Dostoevsky could explain to me about a dream better than some psychologists.

Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it! My brother died five years ago, for instance. I sometimes dream of him; he takes part in my affairs, we are very much interested, and yet all through my dream I quite know and remember that my brother is dead and buried. How is it that I am not surprised that, though he is dead, he is here beside me and working with me? Why is it that my reason fully accepts it?
-The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

And Proust could write some great stuff on “awareness.”
[It’s a bit long. Sorry. But it’s a worth reading, I promise.]

…I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?

I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. The tea has called up in me, but does not itself understand, and can only repeat indefinitely with a gradual loss of strength, the same testimony; which I, too, cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call upon the tea for it again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

And I begin again to ask myself what it could have been, this unremembered state which brought with it no logical proof of its existence, but only the sense that it was a happy, that it was a real state in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished. I decide to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I find again the same state, illumined by no fresh light. I compel my mind to make one further effort, to follow and recapture once again the fleeting sensation. And that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit all attention to the sounds which come from the next room. And then, feeling that my mind is growing fatigued without having any success to report, I compel it for a change to enjoy that distraction which I have just denied it, to think of other things, to rest and refresh itself before the supreme attempt. And then for the second time I clear an empty space in front of it. I place in position before my mind's eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.

Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too much confused; scarcely can I perceive the colourless reflection in which are blended the uncapturable whirling medley of radiant hues, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate to me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste of cake soaked in tea; cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, of what period in my past life.

Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise? Ten times over I must essay the task, must lean down over the abyss. And each time the natural laziness which deters us from every difficult enterprise, every work of importance, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of to-day and of my hopes for to-morrow, which let themselves be pondered over without effort or distress of mind.

And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, all from my cup of tea.

-"Remembrance of Things Past"

[sparklekaz]

Hi Monty,

I really loved reading this. Not just because of the subject matter of mindfulness, but because of the sumptious prose with which the author writes. I have always found taste and smell to be very powerful memory triggers. And I too have discovered that most all, good and bad have their roots firmly based in childhood.

The smell of cabbage lingering may be distasteful to many. But to me, I am transported back to my Grandmother's house as a child when she would make Cuncannon, an traditional Irish dish of boiled bacon and cabbage. The most wonderful flavour and eaten in very warm and loving surroundings. I also feel that smells can evoke even deeper memories. To explain... I was born in Birmingham which is a city in the West Midlands in Birmingham. At the age of 12 we moved to a little village in Mid Wales. It was Autumn and the days were cold and damp. One quiet afternoon I was walking through the village exploring my new home. Everything seemed alien and different. Having moved from a bustling city, I found the quietness strange even desolate. Not a soul was around.

I became aware of a pungent smell. Like damp leaves and wood burning. I'd never smelt anything like it before. But in me rose this intense feeling of recognition and familiarity. Suddenly, for no reason I could explain, I felt such a longing rise up in the pit of my stomach. A powerful feeling of homesickness - for what I could not say! I just felt so terribly sad. As time went on, and I became more familiar with the smell, it's impact lessened. But that first time was as if I was being mentally transported back to a different time and place. As a 12 year old I felt confused and disorientated by it. As an adult and I look back, I wonder - was it a past life memory? I don't know! Have you ever had any experience like that Monty?

Love and light
Kaz

[gruntal]

I remember in the late 1970's making a few trips to San Francisco from where I lived near Los Angeles. I was young so the 450 mile trip could easily be made in one day; I would stay over the next day to begin my journey back two days later. I loved San Francisco! They had five remaining trolley car lines, three cable car lines; staying in a motel in nearby Red Wood City I just parked the company van and took the Southern Pacfic San Jose comunter train into town. The Harrimam style commuter coaches dated from the 1920's! Oh joy! To me it was like a living museum. It was like a giant theme park! ( The theme was San Francisco ....).

Alas I discovered I could save a few hours going there by using the "inland route" thru the San Jouquin Valley at the cost of mostly just enduring the bone dry air, the heat, the endless cows as far as the eye could see. The warm air didn't even smell very good!

Around Tracy, about 35 miles south of San Francisco I would just begin the feel the cool moist air that would surround me and everyone else at my arrival. It was so refreshing and encouraging! It even seemed to taste delicious! I could feel my reward coming up to me! Very soon I would be in my favorite city with a climate right out of heaven! I never in my life felt air so vivedly. It was like a word association in that I equated that special San Francisco air with comfort and joy.

Well over the years big cities became frightening to me and my now my health problems encourage me to seek very dry ciimates so I am happy where I am which is 500 miles south of San Francisco on the low desert. But I will never forget that first whiff of air coming thru the can window telling me I was only a few more miles away from the end of my trip to San Francisco.

I wonder how long that memory will stay with me ?  Not to mention of the nightmare of stoping the journey half ways at Fresno, getting off the freeway, and actually staying where they grow garlic for a living? Awrk! Well actually it might not be such a bad place to live. It just never occurred to me to stop and gawk. I had to continue the journey at all costs. Just passing by on my way to San Francisco.

That might have hidden meanings. But I am too preoccupied going somewhere to notice what .

[donq]

Hi Karen,

I was going to say it was a beautiful prose of yours but it might sound like my flattery. Let me just say that you really got the essence of the writing and had the beautiful/unique way to express yourself into words (come on, at least I’ve been an editor for 30 years, so I know about this stuff, more or less, ok?
As for taste and smell, as far as I remember, there were two great writers used to mention about this. One was Gu long (as on my first post here.) He wrote that not so many writers wrote about the smelling in their novels. But it was so powerful emotional trigger (for example, bad smell which could frighten us more than anything else.)

(Hence the aromatherapy? if vice versa.

Another great writer was Knut Hamsun.

“The writer must be able to revel and roll in the abundance of words; he must know not only the direct but also the secret power of a word. There are overtones and undertones to a word, and lateral echoes, too.
“Language must resound with all the harmonies of music. The writer must always, at all times, find the tremulous word which captures the thing and is able to draw a sob from my soul by its very rightness.”
“A word can be transformed into a color, light, a smell; it is the writer's task to use it in such a way that it serves, never fails, can never be ignored.”

And the following is from his novel "Hunger":

"The heavy red roses smoldering in the foggy morning, blood-colored and uninhibited, made me greedy, and tempted me powerfully to steal one--I asked the prices merely so I could come as near them as possible.”

About your experience at 12, it was like you got a peak (spiritual) experience even you were still so young. You even could recall it now. Wonderful!
As for me, the memory that comes to my mind right now is when I was in the forest temple. That night it was raining outside the cottage of my friends (the villagers). I was half-sitting, half-lying on a bamboo stretcher by the campfire. I sipped my tea and closed my eyes. I listened to the sound of raindrop and heard my friend speaking softly nearby. My nose smelt the tea and some fragrance of night wild flower (not jasmine, Annonaceae?) This smell really brought my childhood memory back (Thai rice flour muffin had this good smelling and it was my favorite muffin. )
Suddenly, I felt like this was most joyful time in human life. That sound of the sprinkling rain, the voice of my friends, the taste of good hot tea and that pretty smelling etc. I was so sleepy but so happy!

[sparklekaz]

Dear Monty,

I always take praise from you in the spirit of that which it is given. I value your opinion very much.

When you write about your time at the forest temple, you too with your words evoked a beautiful picture; And I as the reader felt for a moment, that I was there with you. And that is exactly why I love words so much. Through them we are drawn along with the writer, as an invisible companion.

What a wonderful experience it must have been. I know from your earlier writing, that your decision to go there did not go down at all well with your family. It shows courage to follow your own path like that, to hold on to your own will and not allow yourself to be compelled to live a life that other's wish for you. Our lives have been so different, and yet I feel a kinship with you. I know in this life I have not had an experience such as yours. And yet, it sounds and feels so familiar when you describe it.

The writer Knut Hamson is unfamiliar to me, but going on the passages you have shared from his book Hunger, I would enjoy reading him. I particularly liked:

“A word can be transformed into a color, light, a smell; it is the writer's task to use it in such a way that it serves, never fails, can never be ignored.”

“The writer must be able to revel and roll in the abundance of words; he must know not only the direct but also the secret power of a word. There are overtones and undertones to a word, and lateral echoes, too.

“Language must resound with all the harmonies of music. The writer must always, at all times, find the tremulous word which captures the thing and is able to draw a sob from my soul by its very rightness.”

Just beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

Love and light
Kaz

[sparklekaz]

Dear George,

You too my friend have a wonderful way with words - of telling a story. I really enjoyed traveling down memory lane with you as you recounted your memories of the trips you made to San Francisco when you were younger. You really brought it to life. How lucky are we, to have the gift of memory. To be able to revisit happier times and places in our minds. I know as we grow older our memories can at times be sketchy. But the long term memory stays for many, as pristine as the day those memories were created.

Thak you so much for sharing.

Love and light
Kaz

[donq]

Hi Gruntal and Kaz,

What both of you wrote remind me of Pan, a great novel by Knut Hamsun. Let me quote some from it here:
(The protagonist in the novel is Glahn. He lived in the beautiful surroundings, a forest.

“From the hut where I lived, I could see a confusion of rocks and reefs and islets, and a little of the sea, and a bluish mountain peak or so; behind the hut was the forest. A huge forest it was; and I was glad and grateful beyond measure for the scent of roots and leaves, the thick smell of the fir-sap, that is like the smell of marrow. Only the forest could bring all things to calm within me; my mind was strong and at ease…

“There was a stone outside my hut, a tall grey stone. It looked as if it had a sort of friendly feeling towards me; as if it noticed me when I came by, and knew me again. I liked to go round that way past the stone, when I went out in the morning; it was like leaving a good friend there, who I knew would be still waiting for me when I came back…

“Out beyond the islands, the sea lay heavily calm. Many a time I have stood and looked at it from the hills, far up above. On a calm day, the ships seemed hardly to move at all; I could see the same sail for three days, small and white, like a gull on the water. Then, perhaps, if the wind veered round, the peaks in the distance would almost disappear, and there came a storm, the south-westerly gale; a play for me to stand and watch. All things in a seething mist. Earth and sky mingled together, the sea flung up into fantastic dancing figures of men and horses and fluttering banners on the air. I stood in the shelter of an overhanging rock, thinking many things; my soul was tense. Heaven knows, I thought to myself, what it is I am watching here, and why the sea should open before my eyes. Maybe I am seeing now the inner brain of earth, how things are at work there, boiling and foaming…

"In winter, I come walking along, and see, perhaps, the tracks of ptarmigan in the snow. Suddenly the track disappears; the bird has taken wing. But from the marks of the wings I can see which way the game has flown, and before long I have tracked it down again. There is always a touch of newness in that for me. In autumn, many a time there are shooting stars to watch. Then I think to myself, being all alone, What was that? A world seized with convulsions all of a sudden? A world going all to pieces before my eyes? To think that I—that I should be granted the sight of shooting stars in my life! And when summer comes, then perhaps there may be a little living creature on every leaf; I can see that some of them have no wings; they can make no great way in the world, but must live and die on that one little leaf where they came into the world…

“Then sometimes I look at the grass, and perhaps the grass is looking at me again—who can say? I look at a single blade of grass; it quivers a little, maybe, and thinks me something. And I think to myself: Here is a little blade of grass all a-quivering. Or if it happens to be a fir tree I look at, then maybe the tree has one branch that makes me think of it a little, too…

"....I'm filled with a mysterious gratitude; everything befriends me, intermingles with me, I love all things. I pick up a dry twig, hold it in my hand and look at it as I sit there having my own thoughts. The twig is nearly rotten, its poor bark affects me, pity stirring my heart. And when I get up to go, I do not throw the twig away but lay it down and stand there feeling sorry for it…

“I was happy and weary; all the creatures came up close and looked at me; there were insects on the trees and oil-beetles crawling on the road. Well met! I said to myself. The feeling of the woods went through and through my senses; I cried for love of it all, and was utterly happy; I was dissolved in thanksgiving. Dear woods, my home, God's peace with you from my heart...I stopped and turned all ways, named the things with tears. Birds and trees and stones and grass and ants, I called them all by name, looked round and called them all in their order. I looked up to the hills and thought: Now, now I am coming, as if in answer to their calling. Far above, the dwarf falcon was hacking away—I knew where its nests were. But the sound of those falcons up in the hills sent my thoughts far away…

“About noon I rowed out and landed on a little island, an islet outside the harbour. There were mauve-coloured flowers with long stalks reaching to my knees; I waded in strange growths, raspberry and coarse grass; there were no animals, and perhaps there had never been any human being there. The sea foamed gently against the rocks and wrapped me in a veil of murmuring; far up on the egg-cliffs, all the birds of the coast were flying and screaming. But the sea wrapped me round on all sides as in an embrace. Blessed be life and earth and sky, blessed be my enemies; in this hour I will be gracious to my bitterest enemy, and bind the latchet of his shoe...”

[sparklekaz]

Hi Monty,

What a brilliant writer Knut is. I would so love to read this book. It is exactly the kind of story I like to lose myself in. His words conjure up such a vivid impression of the forest and the island, that you really feel you are there with him.

It describes beautifully how in isolation and deep within nature, our perspective of the world shifts. How we can dive in, plunging below the surface layers, and experience a real connection and depth of empathy with the natural world. Analogies and metaphors for life and our relationship with it in all it's glorious forms, jumps right off the page. Truly beautiful.

I particularly loved: "....I'm filled with a mysterious gratitude; everything befriends me, intermingles with me, I love all things. I pick up a dry twig, hold it in my hand and look at it as I sit there having my own thoughts. The twig is nearly rotten, its poor bark affects me, pity stirring my heart. And when I get up to go, I do not throw the twig away but lay it down and stand there feeling sorry for it…"

"The feeling of the woods went through and through my senses; I cried for love of it all, and was utterly happy; I was dissolved in thanksgiving. Dear woods, my home, God's peace with you from my heart...I stopped and turned all ways, named the things with tears. Birds and trees and stones and grass and ants, I called them all by name, looked round and called them all in their order. I looked up to the hills and thought: Now, now I am coming, as if in answer to their calling."


Thank you for sharing.

Love and light
Kaz

[donq]

Dear Karen,

As far as I know, The Project Gutenberg has some of Hamsun’s works in English for reading online and downloading (including this one, Pan). All are for free.

www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=Knut+Hamsun

P.S. You can delete the link if it’s not supposed to be here.