When I learned that all the complaints I had sent a friend before—about winter break, about death—were actually covered by existentialism’s ultimate concern with death, I found it fascinating. I was also relieved that I was not the only person who thinks about these things.
This was also the first time I highlighted and annotated at such a high frequency.
Part One: Death
1. Near death: changes forced upon an individual by circumstances beyond their control.
Heidegger’s two modes of being (not the first time I had seen his name, but the first time I had read about him):
The forgetful mode of being:
That is, living in the world of things and immersing oneself in daily trifles. Such a person “drops down a level,” fixates on “idle chatter,” loses themself among “others,” and is directed by the everyday world, caring only about how things ought to be.
This range is still not broad enough. It is precise, but insufficient to encompass everything, so let me extend it a little: 1. following one’s desires, doing only what one wants rather than what one likes, escaping a certain anxiety and regretting it afterward; 2. imagining and sketching a grand future, waiting for it to arrive, while actually doing nothing for it.
This state is somewhat like one ruled by desire and dopamine. It is easy to slip into, and I always do so without noticing, only to look back and discover that several months, or even half a year, have passed.
The mindful mode of being (I have to say, the Chinese phrase is difficult both to type and to understand; well done, translator):
A person looks at things as they truly are rather than as they ought to be, and finds them novel. To exist in this mode means remaining continuously aware of one’s existence.
This makes me think of Zhexiu in Fighter of the Destiny. He says, “Either live awake, or die awake.” Compared with Chen Changsheng, who is continually driven by a known death, Zhexiu is a genuine existentialist.
The discussion turns to death with a known limit. In many ways, it is no different from a winter or summer break whose end date is known. Yet after winter break ends there will be a new beginning, while death is forever held by the unknown. Many philosophers and writers have offered similar views, and with a little humor: “From the moment we are born, we are always dying. The final day’s contribution is not greater than any ordinary day; it merely exposes the latent decay for people to see.”
Haruki Murakami also wrote in Norwegian Wood, “Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it that remains forever.” I do not know whether he realized it himself or borrowed someone else’s words.
Let us first discuss what it means to be conscious of death’s arrival. Death is the fundamental source of anxiety. We all know that we will eventually die, but we also build protective mechanisms within ourselves and feel that death has nothing to do with us. Most of the time, we know it, yet we do not truly register it.
How can someone be made clearly aware of it? Here is a hypothesis: your winter break ends in three days.
Only a definite deadline makes awareness unavoidable. I have always called it “circumstances beyond one’s control,” and I will keep that wording here.
The deadline cannot be too distant, either. It must be near, pressing, leaving a person unable to contemplate a future death. Only then will it almost inevitably bring an “urgent experience,” a fundamental transformation. Someone formerly desperate for money and status may suddenly find them unimportant; someone who felt aimless may gain a clear purpose; someone who felt life meaningless may become alive again and find living good. (If you are in the forgetful mode of being, you may think I am talking nonsense here. That seems normal to me.) I recorded a similar experience in Near Being, Far Being.
Scenes like this appear in fiction, but they also happen in real life. Not everyone can experience death, but most people have experienced winter or summer breaks ending many times.
The changes brought by urgent experience are often positive, but because endings such as the end of winter break are not permanent, they may fail to produce a truly fundamental transformation. After some time, a person may return to how they were.
When the end of winter break truly stands before me, I suddenly let go and feel that I have reached the mindful mode of being; before that, I had only been in the forgetful mode of being.
2. Fiction: it extends the length of life.
There is a lot of rambling above, and my ability to organize language is not enough.
One last thing I want to add is that this kind of “urgent experience” can sometimes be gained through novels and manga, especially long novels. I have to reconsider my previous view. I was almost misled by the common opinion that novels are useless; people who say that are the truly useless ones. Fiction itself can give people this simulated, complete experience—something different from film, something that can only be felt in novels and writing.
Today, after finishing the manga adaptation of Three Days of Happiness, I felt the absurdity of how I had been living: looking down on everything, yet accumulating not even the smallest happiness. I read it and was able to critically “return to the starting line.” Perhaps I will keep reading in the future, and keep returning to the start.
This will be a long series. At present I am very interested in this part about death, though I do not know whether I will have more thoughts later, because I have said almost everything I wanted to say this time. If you finish reading it and feel similarly, you can read this book too.
I did not take good notes while reading, but after going through it all, many passages still stayed with me.
Being:
Do you believe in memory?
“Just as we spend one third of life in dreams, the lifetime taken by death is equally as insignificant as the time spent dreaming.”
This looks abstract, but I remember its latter half: what has already passed is as insignificant as if it had never existed. Most anime and novels I have watched or read slowly lose their original color in the palace of memory. Feelings that were once intense—I could shout that I love Yunyun, I love Jiuyou—now seem much thinner. As distance grows, the astonishing impression Li Changge once made on me has also dimmed.
Each time I finish an anime, I am immersed less in the sadness of contrast with reality than in the thought that, once it is over, the image in my heart can no longer remain forever.
At such times I often complained to my classmates, but thinking about it now, that was a very typical pessimistic view.
For example, when an eighty-year-old woman looks back on her life, or someone asks her about it, she might pause, then say with light in her eyes that she lived a fulfilled life.
But if I extended my view to that situation, perhaps I would feel that my life had been a continual losing: this moment loses the previous moment, until in the end nothing remains, including emotion. The insignificance of memory.
For choosing between these two views, I can recommend a manga, Tsunomata no Ichika, also called A Momentary Flower. Its character work is somewhat thin, but what the teacher says in the final lesson is worth remembering.
Compulsion:
A man is going to travel to another place the next day. The night before, he calls women he knows who live there and wants to invite any one of them to dinner. (A sexual invitation.) Only after every one of them rejects him does he let out a long breath and say, “Now I finally have time to open a bottle of wine and read alone.”
In fact, he has plenty of time like that, but he cannot refuse his own urge to make sexual invitations. Only when circumstances beyond his control intervene can he escape from it.
I often encounter situations similar to this.
