Eileen Chang

Andrew F. Jones

Written on Water

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“Wine partaken with a true companion—

“It is not that Nixi lacks feeling. She wants to love this world but never finds an opening. Nor is it the case that she is unloved, but the love she receives is merely the leftover stew and cold table scraps from someone else's meal, as in Du Fu's poem: "Leftover stew and cold scraps / everywhere bitterness concealed.” 

“Nor do I approve of the aesthetes who advocate approve Beauty above all else. I think that their problem lies not in their beauty but in their failure to provide the figure of Beauty with a ground. The water in a mountain stream is merely light and frolicsome, but seawater, though it may seem to ripple in much the same way, also contains within it the prospect of vast oceanic swells. Beautiful things are not necessarily grand, but grand things are always beautiful.”

“The transformation of life into drama is unhealthy. Growing up in the culture of the city, many of us see pictures of the sea before we see the sea itself; we read of love in romance novels long before we experience it in life. Our experience is quite often quite secondhand, borrowed from artificial theatricals, and as a result the line between life and its dramatization becomes difficult to draw.”

Written on Water

Highlights