I. MAN THE ONLY WORKING ANIMAL
THE feast of life is, therefore, before us, and the only question is what appetite
we have for it. The appetite is the thing, and not the feast. After all, the most
bewildering thing about man is his idea of work and the amount of work he imposes
upon himself, or civilization has imposed upon him. All nature loafs, while man alone
works for a living. He works because he has to, because with the progress of
civilization life gets incredibly more complex, with duties, responsibilities, fears,
inhibitions and ambitions, born not of nature, but of human society. While I am sitting
here before my desk, a pigeon is flying about a church steeple before my window, not
worrying what it is going to have for lunch. I know that my lunch is a more complicated
affair than the pigeon's, and that the few articles of food I take involve thousands
of people at work and a highly complicated system of cultivation, merchandising,
transportation, delivery and preparation. That is why it is harder for man to get
food than for animals. Nevertheless, if a jungle beast were lei loose in a city and
gained some apprehension of what busy human life was all about, he would feel a good
deal of skepticism and bewilderment about this human society.
The first thought that the jungle beast would have is that man is the only working
animal. With the exception of a few draught-horses or buffalos made to work a mill,
even domestic pets don't have to work. Police dogs are but rarely called upon to do
their duty; a house dog supposed to watch a house plays most of the time, and takes
a good nap in the morning whenever there is good, warm sunshine;
the aristocratic cat certainly never works for a living, and gifted with a bodily
agility which enables it to disregard a neighbor's fence, it is even unconscious of
its captivity it just goes wherever it likes to go.
So, then, we have this toiling humanity alone, caged and domesticated, but not fed,
forced by this civilization and complex society to work and worry about the matter
of feeding itself. Humanity has its own advantages, I am quite aware the delights
of knowledge, the pleasures of conversation and the joys of the imagination, as for
instance in watching a stage play. But the essential fact remains that human life
has got too complicated and the matter of merely feeding ourselves, directly or
indirectly, is occupying well over ninety per cent of our human activities.
Civilization is largely a matter of seeking food, while progress is that development
which makes food more and more difficult to get. If it had not been made so difficult
for man to obtain his food, there would be absolutely no reason why humanity should
work so hard. The danger is that we get over-civilized and that we come to a point,
as indeed we have already done, when the work of getting food is so strenuous that
we lose our appetite for food in the process of getting it. This doesn't seem to make
very much sense, from the point of view either of the jungle beast or the philosopher.
Every time I see a city skyline or look over a stretch of roofs, I get frightened.
It is positively amazing. Two or three water towers, the backs of two or three steel
frames for billboards, perhaps a spire or two, and a stretch of asphalt roofing
material and bricks going up in square, sharp, vertical outlines without any form
or order, sprinkled with some dirty, discolored chimneys and a few washlines and
crisscross lines of radio aerials. And looking down into a street, I see again a
stretch of gray or discolored red brick walls, with tiny, dark, uniform windows in
uniform rows, half open and half hidden by shades, with perhaps a bottle of milk
standing on a windowsill and a few pots of tiny, sickly flowers on some others. A
child comes up to the roof with her dog and sits on the roof-stairs every morning
to get a bit of sunshine. And as I lift my eyes again, I see rows upon rows of roofs,
miles of them, stretching in ugly square outlines to the distance. More water towers,
more brick houses. And humanity live here. How do they live, each family behind one
or two of these dark windows? What do they do for a living? It is staggering. Behind
every two or three windows, a couple go to bed every night like pigeons returning
to their pigeonholes ; then they wake up and have their morning coffee and the husband
emerges into the street, going somewhere to find bread for the family, while the wife
tries persistently and desperately to drive out the dust and keep the little place
clean. By four or five o'clock they come out on their doorsteps to chat with and look
at their neighbors and get a sniff of fresh air. Then night falls, they are dead tired
and go to sleep again. And so they live!
There are others, more well-to-do people, living in better apartments. More "arty"
rooms and lampshades. Still more orderly and more clean! They have a little more space,
but only a little more.
To rent a seven-room flat, not to speak of owning it, is considered a luxury! But
it does not imply more happiness. Less financial worry and fewer debts to think about,
it is true. But also more emotional complications, more divorce, more cat-husbands
that don't come home at night, or the couple go prowling together at night, seeking
some form of dissipation. Diversion is the word. Good Lord, they need to be diverted
from these monotonous, uniform brick walls and shining wooden floors! Of course they
go to look at naked women. Consequently more neurasthenia, more aspirin, more
expensive illnesses, more colitis, appendicitis and dyspepsia, more softened brains
and hardened livers, more ulcerated duodenums and lacerated intestines, overworked
stomachs and overtaxed kidneys, inflamed bladders and outraged spleens, dilated
hearts and shattered nerves, more flat chests and high blood pressure, more diabetes.
Bright's disease, beri-beri, rheumatism, insomnia, arterio-sclerosis, piles,
fistulas, chronic dysentry, chronic constipation, loss of appetite and weariness of
life. To make the picture perfect, more dogs and fewer children. The matter of
happiness depends entirely upon the quality and temper of the men and women living
in these elegant apartments. Some indeed have a jolly life, others simply don't. But
on the whole, perhaps they are less happy than the hard-working people; they have
more ennui and more boredom. But they have a car, and perhaps a country home. Ah,
the country home, that is their salvation ! So then, people work hard in the country
so that they can come to the city so that they can earn sufficient money and go back
to the country again.
And as you take a stroll through the city, you see that back of the main avenue with
beauty parlors and flower shops and shipping firms is another street with drug stores,
grocery stores, hardware shops, barber shops, laundries, cheap eating places,
news-stands. You wander along for an hour, and if it is a big city, you are still
there;you see only more streets, more drug stores, grocery stores, hardware shops,
barber shops, laundries, cheap eating places and news-stands. How do these people
make their living? And why do they come here ? Very simple. The laundrymen wash the
clothes of the barbers and restaurant waiters, the restaurant waiters wait upon the
laundrymen and barbers while they eat, and the barbers cut the hair of the laundrymen
and waiters. That is civilization. Isn't it amazing? I bet some of the laundrymen,
barbers and waiters never wander beyond ten blocks from their place of work in their
entire life. Thank God they have at least the movies, where they can see birds singing
on the screen, trees growing and swaying, Turkey, Egypt, the Himalayas, the Andes,
storms, shipwrecks, coronation ceremonies, ants, caterpillars, muskrats, a fight
between lizards and scorpions, hills, waves, sands, clouds, and even a moon all on
the screen!wise humanity, terribly wise humanity ! Of thee I sing. How inscrutable
is the civilization where men toil and work and worry their hair gray to get a living
and forget to play!

II. THE CHINESE THEORY OF LEISURE
The American is known as a great hustler, as the Chinese is known as a great loafer.
And as all opposites admire each other, I suspect that the American hustler admires
the Chinese loafer as much as the Chinese loafer admires the American hustler. Such
things are called the charms of national traits. I do not know if eventually the West
and the East will meet; the plain fact is that they are meeting now, and are going
to meet more and more closely as modern civilization spreads, with the increase of
communication facilities. At least, in China, we are not going to defy this machine
civilization, and there the problem will have to be worked out as to how we are going
to merge these two cultures, the ancient Chinese philosophy of life and the modern
technological civilization, and integrate them into a sort of working way of life.
The question is very much more problematical as to Occidental life ever being invaded
by Oriental philosophy, although no one would dare to prophesy.
After all, the machine culture is rapidly bringing us nearer to the age of leisure,
and man will be compelled to play more and work less. It is all a matter of environment,
and when man finds leisure hanging on his hand, he will be forced to think more about
the ways and means of wisely enjoying his leisure, conferred upon him, against his
will, by rapidly improving methods of quick production. After all, no one can predict
anything about the next century. He would be a brave man who dared even to predict
about life thirty years from now. The constant rush for progress must certainly one
day reach a point when man will be pretty tired of it all, and will begin to take
stock of his conquests in the material world. I cannot believe that, with the coming
of better material conditions of life, when diseases are eliminated, poverty is
decreased and man's expectation of life is prolonged and food is plentiful, man will
care to be as busy as he is today. I'm not so sure that a more lazy temperament will
not arise as a result of this new environment.
Apart from all this, the subjective factor is always as important as the objective.
Philosophy comes in as a way of changing man's outlook and also changing his character.
How man is going to react toward this machine civilization depends on what kind of
a man he is. In the realm of biology, there are such things as sensibility to stimulus,
slowness or quickness of reaction, and different behaviors of different animals in
the same medium or environment. Some animals react more slowly than others. Even in
this machine civilization, which I understand includes the United States,  England,
France, Germany, Italy and Russia, we see that different reactions toward the
mechanical age arise from different racial temperaments. The chances of peculiar
individual reactions to the same environment are not eliminated. For China, I feel
the type of life resulting from it will be very much like that in modern France, because
the Chinese and the French temperaments are so akin.
America today is most advanced in machine civilization, and it has always been assumed
that the future'of a world dominated by the machine will tend toward the present
American type and pattern of life. I feel inclined to dispute this thesis, because
no one knows yet what the American temperament is going to be. At best we can only
describe it as a changing temperament. I do not think it at all impossible that there
may be a revival of that period of New England culture so well described in Van Wyck
Brooks' new book. No one can say that that flowering of New England culture was not
typically American culture, and certainly no one can say that that ideal Walt Whitman
envisaged in his Democratic Vistas, pointing to the development of free men and
perfect mothers, is not the ideal of democratic progress. America needs only to be
given a little respite, and there may be I am quite sure there will be new Whitmans,
new Thore-aus and new Lowells, when that old American culture, cut short literally
and figuratively by the gold rush, may blossom forth again. Will not, then, American
temperament be something quite different from that of the present day, and very near
to the temperament of E-merson and Thoreau ?
Culture, as I understand it, is essentially a product of leisure. The art of culture
is therefore essentially the art of loafing. From the Chinese point of view, the man
who is wisely idle is the most cultured man. For there seems to be a philosophic
contradiction between being busy and 'being wise. Those who .are wise won't be busy,
and those who are too busy can't be wise. The wisest man is therefore he who loafs
most gracefully. Here I shall try to explain, not the technique and varieties of
loafing as practised in China but rather the philosophy which nourishes this divine
desire for loafing in China and gives rise to that carefree, idle, happy-go-lucky and
often poetic temperament in the Chinese scholars, and to a lesser extent, in the
Chinese people in general. How did that Chinese temperament that distrust of
achievement and success and that intense love of living as such  arise?
In the first place, the Chinese theory of leisure, as expressed by a comparatively
unknown author of the eighteenth century, Shu Paih-siang, who happily achieved
oblivion, is as follows: time is useful because it is not being used. "Leisure in
time is like unoccupied floor space in a room. Every working girl who rents a small
room where every inch of space is fully utilized feels highly uncomfortable because
she has no room to move about, and the moment she gets a raise in salary, she moves
into a bigger room where there is a little more unused floor space, besides those
strictly useful spaces occupied by her single bed, her dressing table and her
two-burner gas range. It is that unoccupied space which makes a room habitable, as
it is our leisure hours which make life endurable. I understand there is a rich woman
living on Park Avenue, who bought up a neighboring lot to prevent anybody from erecting
a skyscraper next to her house. She is paying a big sum of money in order to have
space fully and perfectly made useless, and it seems to me she never spent her money
more wisely.
In this connection, I might mention a personal experience. I could never see the beauty
of skyscrapers in New York, and it was not until I went to Chicago that I realized
that a skyscraper could be very imposing and very beautiful to look at, if it had
a good frontage and at least half a mile of unused space around it. Chicago is fortunate
in this respect, because it has more space than Manhattan. The tall buildings are
better spaced, and there is the possibility of obtaining an unobstructed view of them
from a long distance. Figuratively speaking, we, too, are so cramped in our life that
we cannot enjoy a free perspective of the beauties of our spiritual life. We lack
spiritual frontage.

III. THE CULT OF THE IDLE LIFE
The Chinese love of leisure arises from a combination of causes. It came from a
temperament, was erected into a literary cult, and found its justification in a
philosophy. It grew out of an intense love of life, was actively sustained by an
underlying current of literary romanticism throughout the dynasties, and was
eventually pronounced right and sensible by a philosophy of life, which we may, in
the main, describe as Taoistic. The rather general acceptance of this Taoistic view
of life is only proof that there is Taoistic blood in the Chinese temperament .
And here we must first clarify one point. The romantic cult of the idle life, which
we have defined as a product of leisure, was decidedly not for the wealthy class,
as we usually understand it to be. That would be an unmitigated error in the approach
to the problem. It was a cult for the poor and unsuccessful and humble scholar who
either had chosen the idle life or had idleness enforced upon him. As I read Chinese
literary masterpieces, and as I imagine the poor schoolmaster teaching the poor
scholars these poems and essays glorifying the simple and idle life, I cannot help
thinking that they must have derived an immense personal satisfaction and spiritual
consolation from them. Disquisitions on the handicaps of fame and advantages of
obscurity sounded pleasing to those who had failed in the civil examinations, and
such sayings as "Eating late (with appetite whetted) is eating meat" tended to make
the bad provider less apologetic to his family. No greater misjudgment of literary
history is made than when the young Chinese proletarian writers accuse the poets Su
Tungpo and T'ao Yuanming and others of belonging to the hated leisure-class
intelligentsia Su who sang about "the clear breeze over the stream and bright moon
over the hills, " and T'ao who sang about "the dew making wet his skirt" and "a hen
roosting on the top of a mulberry tree. " As if the river breeze and the moon over
the hills and the hen roosting on a mulberry tree were owned only by the capitalist
class! These great men of the past went beyond the stage of talking about peasant
conditions, and lived the life of the poor peasant themselves and found peace and
harmony in it.
In this sense I regard this romantic cult of the idle life as essentially democratic.
We can better understand this romantic cult when we picture for ourselves Laurence
Sterne on his sentimental journey, or Wordsworth and Coleridge hiking through Europe
on foot with a great sense of beauty in their breast, but very little money in their
purse. There was a time when one didn't have to be rich in order to travel, and even
today travel doesn't have to be a luxury of the rich. On the whole, the enjoyment
of leisure is something which decidedly costs less than the enjoyment of luxury. All
it requires is an artistic temperament which is bent on seeking a perfectly useless
afternoon spent in a perfectly useless manner. The idle life really costs so very
little, as Thoreau took the trouble to point out in Walden .
The Chinese romanticists were, on the whole, men gifted with a high sensibility and
a vagabond nature, poor in their worldly possessions, but rich in sentiment. They
had an intense love of life which showed itself in their abhorence of all official
life and a stern refusal to make the soul serf to the body. The idle life, so far
from being the prerogative of the rich and powerful and successful (how busy the
successful American men are ! ) was in China an achievement of highmindedness, a
highmindedness very near to the Western conception of the dignity of the tramp who
is too proud to ask favors, too independent to go to work, and too wise to take the
world's successes too seriously. This highmindedness came from, and was inevitably
associated with, a certain sense of detachment toward the drama of life; it came from
the quality of being able to see through life's ambitions and follies and the
temptations of fame and wealth. Somehow the highminded scholar who valued his
character more than his achievements, his soul more than fame or wealth, became by
common consent the highest ideal of Chinese literature. Inevitably he was a man with
great simplicity of living and a proud contempt for worldly success as the world
understands it.
Great men of letters of this class T'ao Yuanming, Su Tungp'o,Po Chiiyi, Yuan Chunglang,
Yuan Tsets'ai were generally enticed into a short term of official life, did a
wonderful job of it, and then got exasperated with its eternal kowtowing and receiving
and sending off of fellow officials, and gladly laying down the burdens of an official
life, returned wisely to the life of retirement. Yuan Chunglang wrote seven successive
petitions to his superior, when he was magistrate of Soochow, complaining of these
eternal kowtowings, and begging to be allowed to return to the life of the free and
careless individual.
A rather extravagant example of the praise of idleness is found in the inscription
of another poet, Po Yiichien, written for his studio, which he called "The Hall of
Idleness":
I'm too lazy to read the Taoist classics, for Too doesn't reside in the books;
Too lazy to look over the sutras, for they go no deeper in Too than its looks.
The essence of Tao consists in a void, clear, and cool, But what is this void except
being the whole day like a fool?
Too lazy am I to read poetry, for when I stop, the poetry will be gone;
Too lazy to play on the ch'in, for music dies on the string where it's born;
Too lazy to drink wine, for beyond the drunkard's dream there are rivers and lakes;
Too lazy to play chess, for besides the pawns there are other stakes;
Too lazy to look at the hills and streams, for there is a painting within my heart's
portals;
Too lazy to face the wind and the moon, for within me is the Isle of the Immortals;
Too lazy to attend to worldly affairs, for inside me are my hut and my possessions;
Too lazy to watch the changing of the seasons, for within me are heavenly processions.
Pine trees may decay and rocks may rot; but I shall always remain what I am.
Is it not fitting that I call this the Hall of Idleness?
This cult of idleness was therefore always bound up with a life of inner calm, a sense
of carefree irresponsibility and an intense whole-hearted enjoyment of the life of
nature. Poets and scholars have always given themselves quaint names like " The Guest
of Rivers and Lakes" ( Tu Fu ) ; " The Recluse of the Eastern Hillside" ( Su Tungp'o) ;
the " Carefree Man of a Misty Lake" ; and "The Old Man of the Haze-Girdled Tower",
etc.
No, the enjoyment of an idle life doesn't cost any money. The capacity for true
enjoyment of idleness is lost in the moneyed class and can be found only among people
who have a supreme contempt for wealth. It must come from an inner richness of the
soul in a man who loves the simple ways of life and who is somewhat impatient with
the business of making money. There is always plenty of life to enjoy for a man who
is determined to enjoy it. If men fail to enjoy this earthly existence we have, it
is because they do not love life sufficiently and allow it to be turned into a humdrum
routine existence. Laotse has been wrongly accused of being hostile to life; on the
other hand, I think he taught the renunciation of the life of the world exactly because
he loved life all too tenderly, to allow the art of living to degenerate into a mere
business of living.
For where there is love, there is jealousy; a man who loves life intensely must be
always jealous of the few exquisite moments of leisure that he has. And he must retain
the dignity and pride always characteristic of a vagabond. His hours of fishing must
be as sacred as his hours of business, erected into a kind of religion as the English
have done with sport. He must be as impatient at having people talk to him about the
stock market at the golf club, as the scientist is at having anybody disturb him in
his laboratory. And he must count the days of departing spring with a sense of sad
regret for not having made more trips or excursions, as a business man feels when
he has not sold so many wares in the day.

IV. THIS EARTH THE ONLY HEAVEN
A sad, poetic touch is added to this intense love of life by the realization that
this life we have is essentially mortal. Strange to say, this sad awareness of our
mortality makes the Chinese scholar's enjoyment of life all the more keen and intense.
For if this earthly existence is all we have, we must try the harder to enjoy it while
it lasts. A vague hope of immortality detracts from our wholehearted enjoyment of
this earthly existence. As Sir Arthur Keith puts it with a typically Chinese feeling,
"For if men believe, as I do, that this present earth is the only heaven, they will
strive all the more to make heaven of it." Su Tungp'o says, "Life passes like a spring
dream without a trace, " and that is why he clung to it so fondly and tenaciously .
It is this sentiment of our mortal existence that we run across again and again in
Chinese literature. It is this feeling of the imper-manence of existence and the
evanescence of life, this touch of sadness, which overtakes the Chinese poet and
scholar always at the moment of his greatest feasting and merrymaking, a sadness that
is expressed in the regret that "the moon cannot always be so round and the flowers
cannot forever look so fair" when we are watching the full moon in the company of
beautiful flowers. It was in that poem commemorating a gorgeous feast on "A Spring
Night amidst Peach Blossoms" that Li Po penned the favorite line: " Our floating life
is like a dream; how many times can one enjoy one's self?" And it was in the midst
of a gay reunion of his happy and illustrious friends that Wang Hsichih wrote that
immortal little essay, "The Orchid Pavilion", which gives, better than anything else,
this typical feeling about the evanescence of life:
In the ninth year of the reign Yungho [A. D. 353] in the beginning of late spring
we met at the Orchid Pavilion in Shanyin of Kweich'i for the Water Festival, to wash
away the evil spirits.
Here are gathered all the illustrious persons and assembled both the old and the young.
Here are tall mountains and majestic peaks, trees with thick foliage and tall bamboos.
Here are also clear streams and gurgling rapids, catching one's eye from the right
and left. We group ourselves in order, sitting by the waterside, and drink in
succession from a cup floating down the curving stream; and although there is no music
from string and wood-wind instruments,  yet with alternate singing and drinking, we
are well disposed to thoroughly enjoy a quiet intimate conversation. Today the sky
is clear, the air is fresh and the kind breeze is mild. Truly enjoyable it is to watch
the immense universe above and the myriad things below, travelling over the entire
landscape with our eyes and allowing our sentiments to roam about at will, thus
exhausting the pleasures of the eye and the ear.
Now when people gather together to surmise life itself, some sit and talk and unburden
their thoughts in the intimacy of a room, and some, overcome by a sentiment, soar
forth into a world beyond bodily realities. Although we select our pleasures according
to our inclinations some noisy and rowdy, and others quiet and sedate yet when we
have found that which pleases us, we are all happy and contented, to the extent of
forgetting that we are growing old. And then, when satiety follows satisfaction, and
with the change of circumstances, change also our whims and desires, there then arises
a feeling of poignant regret. In the twinkling of an eye, the objects of our former
pleasures have become things of the past, still compelling in us moods of regretful
memory. Furthermore, although our lives may be long or short, eventually we all end
in nothingness. " Great indeed are life and death" said the ancients. Ah ! what
sadness!
I often study the joys and regrets of the ancient people, and as I lean over their
writings and see that they were moved exactly as ourselves, I am often overcome by
a feeling of sadness and compassion, and would like to make those things clear to
myself. Well I know it is a lie to say that life and death are the same thing, and
that longevity and early death make no difference! Alas! as we of the present look
upon those of the past, so will posterity look upon our present selves. Therefore,
have I put down a sketch of these contemporaries and their sayings at this feast,
and although time and circumstances may change, the way they will evoke our moods
of happiness and regret will remain the same. What will future readers feel when they
cast their eyes upon this writing!
Belief in our mortality, the sense that we are eventually going to crack up and be
extinguished like the flame of a candle, I say, is a gloriously fine thing. It makes
us sober; it makes us a little sad; and many of us it makes poetic. But above all,
it makes it possible for us(D  Incidentally, the manuscript of this essay, or rather
its early rubbings, are today the most highly valued examples of Chinese calligraphy,
because the writer and author, Wang Hsichih, is the acknowledged Prince of Calligraphy.
For three times he failed to improve upon his original handwriting, and so today the
script is preserved to us in rubbings, with all the deletions and additions as they
stood in the first draft.to make up our mind and arrange to live sensibly, truthfully
and always with a sense of our own limitations. It gives peace also, because true
peace of mind comes from accepting the worst. Psychologically, I think, it means a
release of energy.
When Chinese poets and common people enjoy themselves, there is always a subconscious
feeling that the joy is not going to last forever, as the Chinese often say at the
end of a happy reunion, "Even the most gorgeous fair, with mat-sheds stretching over
a thousand miles, must sooner or later come to an end. " The feast of life is the
feast of Nebuchadnezzar. This feeling of the dreamlike quality of our existence
invests the pagan with a kind of spirituality. He sees life essentially as a Sung
landscape artist sees mountain scenery, enveloped in a haze of mystery, sometimes
with the air dripping with moisture.
Deprived of immortality, the proposition of living becomes a simple proposition. It
is this: that we human beings have a limited span of life to live on this earth, rarely
more than seventy years, and that therefore we have to arrange our lives so that we
may live as happily as we can under a given set of circumstances. Here we are on
Confu-cian ground. There is something mundane, something terribly earth-bound about
it, and man proceeds to work with a dogged common-sense, very much in the spirit of
what George Santayana calls "animal faith". With this animal faith, taking life as
it is, we made a shrewd guess, without Darwin's aid as to our essential kinship with
animals. It made us therefore, cling to life the life of the instinct and the life
of the senses on the belief that, as we are all animals, we can be truly happy only
when all our normal instincts are satisfied normally. This applies to the enjoyment
of life in all its aspects.
Are we therefore materialistic? A Chinese would hardly know how to answer this
question. For with his spirituality based on a kind of material, earth-bound existence,
he fails to see the distinction between the spirit and the flesh. Undoubtedly he loves
creature comforts, but then creature comforts are matters of the senses. It is only
through the intellect that man attains the distinction between the spirit and the
flesh, while our senses provide the portals to both, as we have already seen in the
preceding chapter. Music, undoubtedly the most spiritual of our arts, lifting man
to a world of spirit, is based on the sense of hearing. And the Chinese fails to see
why a sympathy of tastes in the enjoyment of food is less spiritual than a symphony
of sounds. Only in this realistic sense, can we feel about the woman we love. A
distinction between her soul and her body is impossible. For if we love a woman, we
do not love her geometrical precision of features, but rather her ways and gestures
in motion, her looks and smiles. But are a woman's looks and smiles physical or
spiritual? No one can say.
This feeling of the reality and spirituality of life is helped by Chinese humanism,
in fact by the whole Chinese way of thinking and living. Chinese philosophy may be
briefly defined as a preoccupation with the knowledge of life rather than the
knowledge of truth. Brushing aside all metaphysical speculations as irrelevant to
the business of living, and as pale reflections engendered in our intellect, the
Chinese philosophers clutch at life itself and ask themselves the one and only eternal
question: " How are we to live?" Philosophy in the Western sense seems to the Chinese
eminently idle. In its preoccupation with logic, which concerns itself with the method
of arrival at knowledge, and epistemology, which poses the question of the possibility
of knowledge, it has forgotten to deal with the knowledge of life itself. That is
so much tomfoolery and a kind of frivolity, like wooing and courtship without coming
to marriage and the producing of children, which is as bad as having redcoated
regiments marching in military parades without going to battle. The German
philosophers are the most frivolous of all; they court truth like ardent lovers, but
seldom propose to marry her.

V. WHAT Is LUCK?
The peculiar contribution of Taoism to the creation of the idle temperament lies in
the recognition that there are no such things as luck and adversity. The great Taoist
teaching is the emphasis on being over doing, character over achievement, and calm
over action. But inner calm is possible only when man is not disturbed by the
vicissitudes of fortune. The great Taoist philosopher Liehtse gave the famous parable
of the Old Man At the Fort:
An Old Man was living with his Son at an abandoned fort on the top of a hill, and
one day he lost a horse. The neighbors came to express their sympathy for this
misfortune, and the Old Man asked "How do you know this is bad luck?" A few days
afterwards, his horse returned with a number of wild horses, and his neighbors came
again to congratulate him on this stroke of fortune, and the Old Man replied, "How
do you know this is good luck ?" With so many horses around, his son began to take
to riding, and one day he broke his leg. Again the neighbors came around to express
their sympathy, and the Old Man replied, "How do you know this is bad luck?" The next
year, there was a war, and because the Old Man's son was crippled, he did not have
to go to the front.
Evidently this kind of philosophy enables a man to stand a few hard knocks in life
in the belief that there are no such things as hard knocks without advantages. Like
medals, they always have a reverse side. The possibility of calm, the distaste for
mere action and bustle, and the running away from success and achievement are possible
with this kind of philosophy, a philosophy which says: Nothing matters to a man who
says nothing matters . The desire for success is killed by the shrewd hunch that the
desire for success means very much the same thing as the fear of failure. The greater
success a man has made, the more he fears a climb down. The illusive rewards of fame
are pitched against the tremendous advantages of obscurity. From the Taoist point
of view, an educated man is one who believes he has not succeeded when he has, but
is not so sure he has failed when he fails, while the mark of the half-educated man
is his assumptions that his outward successes and failures are absolute and real.
Hence, the distinction between Buddhism and Taoism is this: the goal of the Buddhist
is that he shall not want anything, while the goal of the Taoist is that he shall
not be wanted at all. Only he who is not wanted by the public can be a carefree
individual, and only he who is a carefree individual can be a happy human being. In
this spirit Chuangtse, the greatest and most gifted among the Taoist philosophers,
continually warns us against being too prominent, too useful and too serviceable.
Pigs are killed and offered on the sacrificial altar when they become too fat, and
beautiful birds are the first to be shot by the hunter for their beautiful plumage.
In this sense, he told the parable of two men going to desecrate a tomb and robbing
the corpse. They hammer the corpse's forehead, break his cheekbones and smash his
jaws, all because the dead man was foolish enough to be buried with a pearl in his
mouth.
The inevitable conclusion of all this philosophizing is: why not loaf?

VI. THREE AMERICAN VICES
To the Chinese, therefore, with the fine philosophy that "Nothing matters to a man
who says nothing matters", Americans offer a strange contrast. Is life really worth
all the bother, to the extent of making our soul a slave to the body? The high
spirituality of the philosophy of loafing forbids it. The most characteristic
advertisement I ever saw was one by an engineering firm with the big words: "Nearly
Right Is Not Enough. " The desire for one hundred percent efficiency seems almost
obscene. The trouble with Americans is that when a thing is nearly right, they want
to make it still better, while for a Chinese, nearly right is good enough.
The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality and the desire for
achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and
so nervous. They steal from them their inalienable right of loafing and cheat them
of many a good, idle and beautiful afternoon. One must start out with a belief that
there are no catastrophes in this world, and that besides the noble art of getting
things done, there is a nobler art of leaving things undone. On the whole, if one
answers letters promptly, the result is about as good or as bad as if he had never
answered them at all. After all, nothing happens, and while one may have missed a
few good appointments, one may have also avoided a few unpleasant ones. Most of the
letters are not worth answering, if you keep them in your drawer for three months;
reading them three months afterwards, one might realize how utterly futile and what
a waste of time it would have been to answer them all. Writing letters really can
become a vice. It turns our writers into fine promotion salesmen and our college
professors into good efficient business executives. In this sense, I can understand
Thoreau's contempt for the American who always goes to the post office.
Our quarrel is not that efficiency gets things done and very well done, too. I always
rely on American water-taps, rather than on those made in China, because American
water-taps do not leak. That is a consolation. Against the old contention, however,
that we must all be useful, be efficient, become officials and have power, the old
reply is that there are always enough fools left in the world who are willing to be
useful, be busy and enjoy power, and so somehow the business of life can and will
be carried on. The only point is who are the wise, the loafers or the hustlers? Our
quarrel with efficiency is not that it gets things done, but that it is a thief of
time when it leaves us no leisure to enjoy ourselves and that it frays our nerves
in trying to get things done perfectly. An American editor worries his hair gray to
see that no typographical mistakes appear on the pages of his magazine. The Chinese
editor is wiser than that. He wants to leave his readers the supreme satisfaction
of discovering a few typographical mistakes for themselves. More than that, a Chinese
magazine can begin printing serial fiction and forget about it halfway. In America
it might bring the roof down on the editors but in China it doesn't matter, simply
because it doesn't matter. American engineers in building bridges calculate so finely
and exactly as to make the two ends come together within one-tenth of an inch. But
when two Chinese begin to dig a tunnel from both sides of a mountain, both come out
on the other side. The Chinese's firm conviction is that it doesn't matter so long
as a tunnel is dug through, and if we have two instead of one, why, we have a double
track to boot. Provided you are not in a hurry, two tunnels are as good as one, dug
somehow, finished somehow and if the train can get through somehow. And the Chinese
are extremely punctual, provided you give them plenty of time to do a thing. They
always finish a thing on schedule, provided the schedule is long enough.
The tempo of modern industrial life forbids this kind of glorious and magnificent
idling. But worse than that, it imposes upon us a different conception of time as
measured by the clock, and eventually turns the human being into a clock himself.
This sort of thing is bound to come to China, as is evident, for instance in a factory
of twenty thousand workers. The luxurious prospect of twenty thousand workers coming
in at their own sweet pleasure at all hours is, of course, somewhat terrifying.
Nevertheless, this is what makes life so hard and hectic. A man who has to be punctually
at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined
for him already. Every American adult is arranging his time on the pattern of the
schoolboy three o'clock for this, five o'clock for that, six-thirty for change of
dress; six-fifty for entering the taxi and seven o'clock for emerging into a hotel
room. It just makes life not worth living.
And Americans have now come to such a sad state that they are booked up not only for
the following day, or the following week, but even for the following month. An
appointment three weeks ahead of time is a thing unknown in China. And when a Chinese
receives an invitation card, happily he never has to say whether he is going to be
present or not. He can put down on the invitation list " coming" if he accepts, or
"thanks" if he declines, but in the majority of cases the invited party merely writes
the word "know , which is a statement of fact that he knows of the invitation and
not a statement of intention. An American or a European leaving Shanghai can tell
me that he is going to attend a committee meeting in Paris on April 19, 1938, at three
o'clock and that he will be arriving in Vienna on May 21st by the seven o'clock train.
If an afternoon is to be condemned and executed, must we announce its execution so
early? Cannot a fellow travel and be lord of himself, arriving when he likes and taking
departure when he likes? But above all, the American's inability to loaf comes
directly from his desire for doing things and in his placing action above being. We
should demand that there be character in our lives as we demand there be character
in all great art worthy of the name. Unfortunately, character is not a thing which
can be manufactured overnight. Like the quality of mellowness in wine, it is acquired
by standing still and by the passage of time. The desire of American old men and women
for action, trying in this way to gain their self-respect and the respect of the
younger generation, is what makes them look so ridiculous to an Oriental. Too much
action in an old man is like a broadcast of jazz music from a megaphone on top of
an old cathedral. Is it not sufficient that the old people are something? Is it
necessary that they must be forever doing something? The loss of the capacity for
loafing is bad enough in men of middle age, but the same loss in old age is a crime
committed against human nature.
Character is always associated with something old and takes time to grow, like the
beautiful facial lines of a man in middle age, lines that are the steady imprint of
the man's evolving character. It is somewhat difficult to see character in a type
of life where every man is throwing away his last year's car and trading it in for
the new model. As are the things we make, so are we ourselves. In 1937 every man and
woman look 1937, and in 1938 every man and woman will look 1938. We love old cathedrals,
old furniture, old silver, old dictionaries and old prints, but we have entirely
forgotten about the beauty of old men. I think an appreciation of that kind of beauty
is essential to our life, for beauty, it seems to me, is what is old and mellow and
well-smoked.
Sometimes a prophetic vision comes to me, a beautiful vision of a millennium when
Manhattan will go slow, and when the American "go-getter" will become an Oriental
loafer. American gentlemen will float in skirts and slippers and amble on the
sidewalks of Broadway with their hands in their pockets, if not with both hands stuck
in their sleeves in the Chinese fashion. Policemen will exchange a word of greeting
with the slow-devil at the crossings, and the drivers themselves will stop and accost
each other and inquire after their grandmothers' health in the midst of traffic. Some
one will be brushing his teeth outside his shopfront, talking the while placidly with
his neighbors, and once in a while, an absent-minded scholar will sail by with a limp
volume rolled up and tucked away in his sleeve. Lunch counters will be abolished,
and people will be lolling and lounging in soft, low armchairs in an Automat, while
others will have learned the art of killing a whole afternoon in some cafe. A glass
of orange juice will last half an hour, and people will learn to sip wine by slow
mouthfuls, punctuated by delightful, chatty remarks, instead of swallowing it at a
gulp. Registration in a hospital will be abolished, "emergency wards" will be unknown,
and patients will exchange their philosophy with their doctors. Fire engines will
proceed at a snail's pace, their staff stopping on the way to gaze at and dispute
over the number of passing wild geese in the sky. It is too bad that there is no hope
of this kind of a millennium on Manhattan ever being realized. There might be so many
more perfect idle afternoons.