上礼拜去听陆先生的英美散文，回来改签名为：

陆谷孙说要多写，我决心听话。"If something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

留此作引。

I sometimes go to a course called An Introduction to Philosophy, taught by the Prince of Philosophy of Fudan, aka, Wang Defeng. You might think there’s a certain dose of irony, injected by me of course, in the above coronation, but curiously enough, no, not this time. Not that I would at any moment idolise Professor Wang as a prince, but it delights me to see someone gain royal halo simply by charming people with philosophy. Besides his teaching, which was nothing less than enchanting, an add-on to his class that entertains me quite profoundly is to behold the students in the front rows engulfed in the mist of the smoke he puffed. Oh, didn’t I mention that he is the only teacher who’s allowed to smoke in classes? I thought I’d mention that earlier.

Well, my little wicked joy in that sight is to imagine that had these students been subjected to such perilous treatment in any other public venue, perpetrated by any one else, most of them would cramp their hands by fanning in front of their noses, and frown so much that their brows would be twisted to a degree that wouldn’t be revocable. Then of course they would in all earnestness stand by Prof. Wang, claiming that talent – the enormous talent of his – justifies the poisonous emission. It sounds cogent enough, doesn’t it? But this kind of apologetics doesn’t really hold water. So you are saying, basically, that you are one hundred percent sure that yesterday, in the cafe, the smoker, on whom you fixated your Medusa’s gaze, is talentless? How do you know that he is not contemplating on the laws of universe, the intricacies of Heidegger, composing a sonnet (a Spenserian one, of course – who cares about the baldy vulgar William), or sketching in his mind the next Chinese submarine?

 OK…but smoking is not the topic today (next time maybe).

 Last Monday, Prof. Wang talked about Buddhism, which decides that there are altogether 8 senses. To save some time on the part of some of my male mates, the seventh sense, much as you might think it should be, is not the thrill of masturbation. The eighth sense, to cut to the point, is called Alaya (阿赖耶识, if it helps); it is, I might have got it completely wrong, the collective human wisdom, the ultimate thought library - anything that you might conjure up in your head, you get it from there.

 I feel that T. S. Elliot is talking about the same thing in his timeless article tradition and the individual talent, assigned by another course 20th Western Literary Criticism. He says that there’s the ‘presentness of the past’, meaning that while I am here drinking Coca Cola and bashing away at my four-year-old greasy Dell keyboard, actually, I have Plato, Freud, Li Bai, Lu Xun right here, standing behind me, over my shoulders extending their hairy arms, caressing my fingers, guiding them to the right characters. In the words of Michael Jackson and Huang Jianxiang, ‘you are not alone, you are not fighting this war on your own’ – you see, everyone is right here, in you.

 In the summer that has just passed, I watched a film called Waking Life, a Philosophical Cartoon film (you retina’s working fine). It is just a compilation of conversations, but if there is such a thing as food for thought, then this film must be ten buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, the best food in the world to me, however much mockery this statement might incur. One of the conversations is between a couple in bed. A man is telling the woman that he has read somewhere about a research. 100 people are asked to do a crossword puzzle; it takes them on average, say, 16.3 minutes to finish it. Then the researchers replace the puzzle with one that was in the newspaper from last week, therefore thousands of people all over the country had already done it: the time it takes the group to finish the ‘used’ puzzle was remarkably lessened. The solution that other people produced before the experiment was already stored into the ‘collective wisdom’, Alaya, if you recall, which was translated into English as ‘store-house consciousness’.

 Of course it might be a tad fanciful to you; as it is to me. More so is what Dan Brown relates in his new novel The Lost Symbol, that the cutting-edge scientific discovery today were all foretold by ancient prophecy. (It is a novel, you are yelling; I know, but Dan Brown habitually, and quite annoyingly, accrues facts on it.) But I am willing to concede that the human wisdom was an organic whole, and every inspiration altered the whole thing, not only influence what’s going to be produced in the future, but also refresh what has been produced in the past. And every generation is not building on what’s laid down by their predecessors, we are but all swimming in that organic whole, trying to have our own share, and share what we have.

 That, the knowledge that the human wisdom throughout history is channelled to, reiterated by, and mutual-corroborating for each other, is the reason why in a single try of ‘hop, skip and jump’ we have managed to gain insights into Hindu Buddhism, Modernistic literary criticism and tabloid entertainment – sorry, cutting-edge scientific research that is.

 Wise man knows very little; because ultimately there’s little to know. (How self-satisfied Socrates is when he says that one thing he knows is that he knows nothing.) We can reduce the explanation for everything to an impressive minimum as we can trace back every species to the nascent single cell. I’ve known this for a long time, and the world keeps feeding me with wonderful examples. 

 In Stylistics lessons, I was introduced to an ee cummings poem：

Me up at does

 

out of the floor

quietly Stare

 

a poisoned mouse

 

still who alive

 

is asking What

have i done that

 

You wouldn't have

 It looks like the poet tossed some words in the air and see that they landed on a sheet of paper, which he promptly handed to the publisher. My dear readers shall have the service of my rough translation, which I am sure would be a disservice to ee cummings: a poisoned mouse quietly Stares up at Me out of the floor. (It) is asking: What have I done that You, who still alive, wouldn’t have. I loved the poem at first sight. The syntactic chaos and grammatical mutiny just captures that eeriness of being sneered by a dead mouse, don’t you think?

 Well, it just puts me in the mood of playing a music critic and talking about Zeng Yike. To start with, let's get two things out of the way: she isn’t pretty and she can’t sing. It is very probable if I give an earnest go at farting in the busiest street of Fudan, five of the ten people who are gonna smell it will sing better than Brother Zeng.

Yes, that I've dealt with. Next comes my point. Can an awful singer create songs - not only write them, but also perform them - that can be considered, in the broadest sense of the word, art? If that Dead Rat mumbo-jumbo of words conveys existential anxiety, why can’t Zeng’s hissy-fizzy of singing moves us with girlish wistfulness and vulnerability?

It’s just like some critics having a go at Dan Brown’s new novel for its lamentable lack of style and elegance. But who’s looking for brilliant language in a Dan Brown book except the lunatics, and the critics? If you are so fond of style, for heaven and hell’s sake look for it somewhere else – Raymond Chandler, for instance, would suit the purpose very well (whose The Long Goodbye I read in the summer). Such scintillating prose and dialogue. But it can not be more obvious that what Dan provides is completely different thing. It is like going to the fruit section of a supermarket, accusing the apples of their failure to connect to Wi-Fi.

On the other hand, Dan Brown’s cliché-ridden and ‘ignoble’ writing, to me, is almost intentional and on the money; requiring not the readers to taste the language is the secret of its becoming a formidable page-turner. However, incidentally, I don’t think this new release, The Lost Symbol, is anywhere near as good as his previous ones. Maybe I have grown out of Dan Brown.

  Being taught something by stylistics, Zeng Yike, and Dan Brown in one whoop, is not Zen; it is simply my kind of art criticism.