Disclaimer: This post was originally written in Chinese and translated into English by GPT-5.2.
Note: It was an assigned-topic essay, but I’ve already forgotten what the prompt was back then.
Life can be a cloud, growing and vanishing amid the ever-changing, unpredictable sky. Wang Xiaobo said that a person’s life is a process of slowly being hammered; a cloud’s life is the same. A cloud suffers all kinds of ravages from its environment—now in white robes, now like a gray dog; no wonder the realist Du Fu sighed, “In life, there is nothing that does not exist,” as if it were just like a cloud. A cloud is also a symbol of liberalism: light and transcendent, gone with the wind, but this is precisely proof of unfreedom. Thus, borrowing Rousseau’s hackneyed words, we arrive at the following conclusion: the cloud is born free, yet everywhere it is in chains.
The story told by the Japanese professor at his retirement ceremony is precisely what reveals to us the chains of life—social relationships. People live within given social relationships that, to themselves, are “a priori”; it is no different from dancing in shackles, yet unavoidable—this is life. The professor’s acquaintance with his “lifelong best friend” in the third grade of elementary school was because “I was even shorter than he was,” so he “got along really well with me.” Birds of a feather flock together; people’s tendencies in making friends are often constrained by the cultural background or cultural orientation they inhabit. Nearly thirty years later, the professor and his friend ran into each other by chance at a café; the professor invited him to dinner and drinks, but the friend was by then a cadre of the “antisocial forces,” the Yamaguchi-gumi, and could not accept. “Positive” and “negative” cannot merge; organizations and groups with opposite natures as defined by the structure of social power each have their own way of living—and sometimes it is even a matter of life and death.
From the pessimist’s standpoint, life really is not a bright, beautiful cloud, but a dark cloud. But there is a famous English saying: Every cloud has a silver lining. Translated literally into Chinese: every dark cloud has a silver edge. From a metaphorical perspective, this sentence conveys a simple truth: even in the darkest places there will be a ray of light, a thread of hope. Yet it is often exactly this ray of light, this thread of hope, that seems to become life’s anesthetic; because of it we forget the existence of the dark cloud, forget the gloom of life, and choose to go on living. This is also where the Japanese professor’s story is moving: an old childhood friend, long parted, never forgot the professor mother’s “home-cooked meal” from thirty years ago; when the mother fell ill and died, he sent a huge sum of money and a telegram of condolence, followed by news that he had died in a gunfight. The professor, too, was heartbroken, and at the cost of his own social identity, insisted on publicly declaring his relationship with that friend at the friend’s grave—an act that broke through the constraints of the social relationships mentioned above.
The friend’s death seems accidental, yet within the accident there also seems to be something intelligible. Judging from the matter of his not being able to accept the dinner invitation, by the time he violated organizational discipline to send the money and condolence telegram to the professor’s mother, it was already not a sign that he wanted to go on living. Just as the professor’s public announcement of their relationship was already a sign that he was prepared to face social opinion. Action is the best expression of thought—their actions precisely showed how important the professor’s mother was to the friend, and how important the friend was to the professor. This importance was no less than life itself! In other words, for the friend, the professor’s mother could even be said to be the sole reason his life existed—the one ray of light, the one thread of hope, under dreary social relationships. “Individual Psychology,” established by Adler, holds that the innate inferiority people are born with makes them try every means to strive for a sense of superiority as compensation. Inferiority and superiority are forever in contest, in stalemate; once superiority loses its foundation, the inferiority that gains the upper hand will take away people’s reason for being. The existence of the professor’s mother may well have been the very foundation on which the friend’s sense of superiority depended.
The American novelist Jodi Picoult’s novel Nineteen Minutes recounts a school shooting; the perpetrator is a male student at the school. This boy is by nature unsociable; from childhood to adulthood he lived under the kidnapping of soft knives from family, school, and society, suffering all kinds of bullying from peers. Over time, he felt there was not a single person around him who cared about him or was concerned for him; even the girl he liked most ended up with the boy he hated most. He felt isolated and mentally stimulated to the point that he developed what is called “post-traumatic stress disorder.” He cast off all moral and social-relationship misgivings, and in the end made the decision to open fire and perish together with his “love rival.” Just as the theme revealed by the novel suggests, this male student, in the final analysis, was also a victim of these unhealthy social relationships; what he did was nothing more than a normal act arising from a deep eruption of self-consciousness—uncontrollable—after someone believed he had completely lost basic respect, care, and a sense of superiority (the recognition of the girl he loved). Even as old as Shen Congwen, he once in the 1940s fell into a spiritual predicament of “abstract lyricism,” into an interpersonal state of “isolated and despairing,” and in the end committed suicide to free himself; even as rational as Rousseau, in the lonely walks of being slandered to exhaustion and isolated from the world, could arrive at the reverie, “I can only feel happy when everyone is happy,” and in the end still died of depression. Whoever it is, when they lose their superiority for survival, either they don’t live, or they die.
The silver lining of the dark cloud is truly illusory, as if a red carrot dangling over a rabbit’s head, luring it to pursue this tantalizing yet unattainable goal regardless of life or death. Just as Qian Zhongshu said when “discussing happiness”: “A few minutes or a few days of happiness earn us a whole lifetime, as we endure much suffering. We hope it comes, hope it stays, hope it comes again—these three sentences summarize the entire history of human striving. While we pursue and wait, life has unknowingly been stolen away.” Life is indeed like a dark cloud, drifting arduously for the sake of a sliver of silver lining.
Before Lady Li died, she was unwilling to see Emperor Wu of Han, fearing that at the moment of parting in life and death she would leave him with an image of herself that was not beautiful. We may find it hard to imagine the transfer to another school that the friend made after being treated by the professor’s mother in the third grade of elementary school, but from the pessimist’s standpoint, this may have been based on the friend’s negative misgivings: perhaps he worried that the maternal presence and smile of the professor’s mother at their first meeting would, under the constraints of the social relationships he did not trust, gradually disappear. If so, it would be better to let it remain forever in memory, not to add further disappointment to an already illusory life, and not to let the silver lining of the dark cloud fade farther and farther away on the distant horizon.
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