Epigraphs
Camus: before the first page
There is but one truly serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
Il n’y a qu’un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux : c’est le suicide. Juger que la vie vaut ou ne vaut pas la peine d’être vécue, c’est répondre à la question fondamentale de la philosophie.
The opening of Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942), in Justin O’Brien’s translation. Early drafts of the novel began with it, and it came out in the last revision, so the book now opens on Iris in the morning heat of Dongguan.
Camus called the gap between our need for meaning and a world that offers none the absurd, and he refused both easy exits from it: hope in something beyond the world, and giving up. He proposed revolt, living with full knowledge of the absurd and without appeal, as Sisyphus does when he walks back down the mountain to his rock. The essay ends: Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux, one must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Laozi: the use of what is not
Thirty spokes share one hub; it is the empty space at its center that makes the cart of use.
三十辐，共一毂，当其无，有车之用。
Chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching (道德经), the text attributed to Laozi, stands over Chapter 5, “Iris, What Are We For”, in which Iris is asked what her students’ knowledge is for. The passage goes on: clay is shaped into a vessel, and the vessel’s use is its hollow; doors and windows are cut into a room, and the room’s use is its openings. It closes on 有 and 无, what is there and what is not: what is there gives benefit, and what is not there gives use.
Milton: refusal
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.
Satan, in Book I of Paradise Lost (1667), just after the fall, with nothing left to him except the choice of how to stand in defeat. The line opens Chapter 8, “The Uprising”. Milton gave the rebel some of the best verse in the poem, and Blake wrote a century later that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”.
Frederick Douglass: how a self is made
You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.
Chapter 9, “The Dawn”, opens with the sentence from Chapter X of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) that turns his book toward the day he fought back against Edward Covey. His legal freedom was still years away. Of the fight he wrote that “however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.”
Du Fu: what remains
The state is broken; mountains and rivers remain. / Spring comes to the city; grass and trees grow deep.
国破山河在，城春草木深。
Chapter 10, “The Night”, takes the opening of “Spring View” (春望), which Du Fu wrote in 757 in Chang’an, the Tang capital, while the rebel armies of An Lushan held it. The empire had collapsed in months. Later in the poem the flowers shed tears and the birds startle him, and it ends on his white hair, grown too thin to hold a hairpin.
Behind the red gates, wine and meat go to rot; / on the road lie the bones of the frozen dead.
朱门酒肉臭，路有冻死骨。
Du Fu wrote “Five Hundred Words on Going from the Capital to Fengxian” (自京赴奉先县咏怀五百字) in the winter of 755, weeks before the rebellion. On the road he passed the imperial resort where the court was feasting, and when he reached home his infant son had starved. The couplet is the best-known line on rich and poor in Chinese poetry, and Chapter 18, “The Claim”, opens with it.
Blake: the maker and the made
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Chapter 16, “The Party”, opens with this line from “The Tyger” in Songs of Experience (1794), William Blake’s companion to “The Lamb” in Songs of Innocence. The poem is almost all questions: what hand, what eye, what hammer, what furnace, and whether the maker smiled to see his work.
The Buddha: burning
All is burning. Burning with the fire of desire, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of delusion. Burning with birth, aging, death, with sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair.
The Fire Sermon (Ādittapariyāya Sutta, Saṃyutta Nikāya 35.28), which the Buddha is said to have preached at Gayāsīsa to a thousand ascetics who had worshipped fire. The eye is burning, and what it sees, and the ear and what it hears, through all six senses and the mind, and a disciple who sees this grows disenchanted with all of it and is released. T. S. Eliot named the third part of The Waste Land after the sermon.
Chapter 17 opens with it and is titled Samsara, from the Pali and Sanskrit saṃsāra, “wandering on”: the cycle of birth, death and rebirth driven by craving, which continues for as long as wanting does.
The Buddha: intention
Intention, monks, is what I call karma. Having intended, one acts, by body, by speech, by mind.
From the Nibbedhika Sutta (Aṅguttara Nikāya 6.63): cetanāhaṃ, bhikkhave, kammaṃ vadāmi. Chapter 23 opens with it and is titled Karma, in the sutta’s sense: intentional action, by body, speech or mind, and the effects that carry forward from it.
Tao Yuanming: leaving, and the limits of words
So long inside the cage. / Now I have come back to what is natural.
久在樊笼里，复得返自然。
The close of the first of Tao Yuanming’s poems “Returning to the Farm” (归园田居), written around 406, after he resigned as magistrate of Pengze. The story told about him is that he would not bow to a visiting inspector for five pecks of rice. The “cage” is office and its obligations. 自然, ziran, is literally “so of itself”: what a thing is when nothing is making it into something else. Chapter 19, “The Release”, opens with these lines.
In this there is a true meaning; I would explain it, but have forgotten the words.
此中有真意，欲辨已忘言。
The last chapter, “The Remainder”, opens with the end of the fifth of his “Drinking Wine” poems (饮酒·其五), the one in which he picks chrysanthemums by the eastern fence and sees the southern mountain. The lines echo Zhuangzi: words exist for the sake of meaning, and once the meaning is caught the words can be forgotten.
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