LinYutang-TheImportanceOfLiving - (EPUB全文下载)

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THE
IMPORTANCE
Of LIVING
a JOHN DAY book
NEW YORK
It is not truth that makes man great, but man that makes truth great.
CONFUCIUS
Only those who take leisurely what the people of the world are busy about can be busy about what the people of the world take leisurely.
CHANG CH’AO

PREFACE

This is a personal testimony, a testimony of my own experience of thought and life. It is not intended to be objective and makes no claim to establish eternal truths. In fact I rather despise claims to objectivity in philosophy; the point of view is the thing. I should have liked to call it “A Lyrical Philosophy,” using the word “lyrical” in the sense of being a highly personal and individual outlook. But that would be too beautiful a name and I must forego it, for fear of aiming too high and leading the reader to expect too much, and because the main ingredient of my thought is matter-of-fact prose, a level easier to maintain because more natural. Very much contented am I to lie low, to cling to the soil, to be of kin to the sod. My soul squirms comfortably in the soil and sand and is happy, Sometimes when one is drunk with this earth, one’s spirit seems so light that he thinks he is in heaven. But actually he seldom rises six feet above the ground.
I should have liked also to write the entire book in the form of a dialogue like Plato’s. It is such a convenient form for personal, inadvertent disclosures, for bringing in the significant trivialities of our daily life, above all for idle rambling about the pastures of sweet, silent thought. But somehow I have not done so. I do not know why, A fear, perhaps, that this form of literature being so little in vogue today, no one probably would read it, and a writer after all wants to be read. And when I say dialogue, I do not mean answers and questions like newspaper interviews, or those leaders chopped up into short paragraphs; I mean really good, long, leisurely discourses extending several pages at a stretch, with many detours, and coming back to the original point of discussion by a short cut at the most unexpected spot, like a man returning home by climbing over a hedge, to the surprise of his walking companion. Oh, how
I love to reach home by climbing over the back fence, and to travel on bypaths! At least my companion will grant that I am familiar with the way home and with the surrounding countryside . . . But I dare not.
I am not original. The ideas expressed here have been thought and expressed by many thinke ............

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