lin yutang

Complexity Appeals to Stupid People

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Complexity appeals to stupid people — it makes them feel superior intellectually, even if they’re making no real progress.

— Mark Rippetoe

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The man who really thinks he has an idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too subtle to be explained. The first idea may really be very outré or specialist; it may really be very difficult to express to ordinary people. But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probable that there is something in it, after all. The honest man is he who is always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable; but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to come out of it.

— G. K. Chesterton, “The Mystagogue”

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I like William James because he speaks of his “raids into philosophy.” He considers common life — a day in Saratoga, for instance — his real feeding ground, and only conducts raids into philosophy to find out what he can get out of it. His mind was far too curious for it to be shut up behind the gray plastered walls of philosophy. I believe I can understand what the professors are talking about in their long words, but I like to see occasional sallies of real insight and horse sense.

— Lin Yutang, The Pleasures of a Nonconformist

The Great Recluse

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The highest ideal of Chinese thought is therefore a man who does not have to escape from human society and human life in order to preserve his original, happy nature. He is only a second-rate recluse, still slave to his environment, who has to escape from the cities and live away in the mountains in solitude. “The Great Recluse is the city recluse,” because he has sufficient mastery over himself not to be afraid of his surroundings. He is therefore the Great Monk (the kaoseng) who returns to human society and eats pork and drinks wine and mixes with women, without detriment to his own soul.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

Kathleen Stock:

For many users, informational exchange is only the incidental pretext to more important things like self-aggrandisement, covert attacks on imagined enemies, and consolidation of social power. In terms of psychological richness, then, Twitter-watching offers a panoply of fascinating characters to rival anything Dickens, Austen, or Eliot could come up with. There are aggressors advertising victimhood; grifters advertising blogs about anti-grifting; fragile souls being grandiose; cruel people preaching kindness. There is also an absolute tsunami of empty sentimentality over other people’s pets, partners, and kids — dead, nearly dead, or just plain cute. The Taoist-style challenge for the observer is simply to notice these things as they are, rather than to get caught up emotionally or wilfully in any of them. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. It’s also pointless judging anybody else for what, after all, are just human traits to which we are nearly all subject. And that’s hard too.

John Gray said, in reference to Richard Dawkins-style evangelical atheism, that it is a curious sort of “humanist” who disdains one of the most enduring and important activities in human life. That sort of “humanism” is more like idealism and its Janus-face misanthropy, the latter of which is revealed when the masses fail to live up to the standards you’ve set for them. As an armchair foolosopher, I’ve always been concerned with the corrosive effects of social media, but I also recognize the futility of wishing that human beings would renounce the petty pleasures of gossiping, boasting, bullying, and attention-seeking in favor of quiet contemplation. And so, like Yutang and Stock, I aim to simply notice the great human drama without getting caught up in it. Perhaps even now, the Henry James of the social media age is compiling notes for his masterpiece, only after which will people say, ah, so there was art to be found there after all.

Cheerfulness Was Always Breaking In

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Humorists handle thoughts and ideas as golf or billiard champions handle their balls, or as cowboy champions handle their lariats. There is an ease, a sureness, a lightness of touch, that comes from mastery. After all, only he who handles his ideas lightly is master of his ideas, and only he who is master of his ideas is not enslaved by them. Seriousness, after all, is only a sign of effort, and effort is a sign of imperfect mastery. A serious writer is awkward and ill at ease in the realm of ideas as a nouveau riche is awkward, ill at ease and self-conscious in society. He is serious because he has not come to feel at home with his ideas.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

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Actually, seriousness is not incompatible with joking. It’s a common mistake to confuse “serious” with “solemn,” and to assume that seriousness of purpose can only be conveyed by solemnity of tone. It’s an understandable error; we do have a marked tendency, we Anglo-Saxons, to answer the big questions with furrowed brow and down-turned mouth. An acquaintance of Dr. Johnson, on hearing of his reputation as a philosopher, remarked, “I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher, but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” But cheerfulness and thoughtfulness aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s simply wrong to assume that everyone who jokes about serious matters like death and pain is somehow failing to deal with them, that laughter is a childish, evasive response and that the only mature reactions are solemn, somber and po-faced.

Jimmy Carr & Lucy Greeves, The Naked Jape: Uncovering the Hidden World of Jokes

We Are All Actors In This Life

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Sometimes people tell me I have “heterodox” or “dissident” views. The first term is favored by classical liberal and centrist types, while the latter is often used by right-wingers, who are also prone to calling themselves “heretics.” These words have always made me cringe, and it’s probably useful to explore why. My general feeling is that there is usually no legitimate justification for using them, as they encourage a kind of unreflective tribalism, lead to alienation and self-pity, and distract from what could be more productive debates.

A healthy marketplace of ideas should keep the focus mainly on which ideas are correct and which are wrong, not on social desirability bias and what the mob is thinking. To approach a conversation from the starting point of thinking about which ideas are “standard” and which are “heterodox” strikes me as the mirror image of “read the room.” The “read the room” crowd is telling you to shut up because what you’re saying is unpopular. But people who always talk about their ideas being oppressed are generally trying to guilt you into taking minority positions. Neither approach is healthy.

— Richard Hanania, “Please Don’t Call Me ‘Heterodox‘”

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Under the spell of that humbug of fame or power, a man is soon prey to other incidental humbugs. There will be no end to it. He soon wants to begin to reform society, to uplift others’ morality, to defend the church, to crush vice, to map programs for others to carry out, to block programs that other people have mapped out, to read before a convention of what other people have done for him under his administration, to sit on committees examining blueprints of an exposition, even to open an insane asylum (what cheek!) — in general, to interfere in other people’s lives.

Yet there is a secondary social humbug, quite as powerful and universal, the humbug of fashion. The courage to be one’s own natural self is quite a rare thing. The Greek philosopher Democritus thought he was doing a great service to mankind by liberating it from the oppression of two great fears: the fear of God and the fear of death. But even that does not liberate us from another equally universal fear: the fear of one’s neighbors. Few men who have liberated themselves from the fear of God and the fear of death are yet able to liberate themselves from the fear of man. Consciously or unconsciously, we are all actors in this life playing to the audience in a part and style approved by them.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

Three to Five Hundred Words

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The literature of China as a whole presents us with a desert of short poems and short essays, seemingly interminable for one who does not appreciate them, and yet as full of variety and inexhaustible beauty as a wild landscape itself.  We have only essayists and letter-writers who try to put their feeling of life in a short note or an essay of three to five hundred words, usually much shorter than the school composition of an American schoolboy. In these casual writings, letters, diaries, literary notes and regular essays, one finds here a brief comment on the vicissitudes of fortune, there a record of some woman who committed suicide in a neighboring village, or of an enjoyable spring party, or a feast in the snow, or boating on a moonlit night, or an evening spent in a temple with a thunderstorm raging outside, generally including the remarks made during the conversation that made the occasion memorable. We find a host of essayists who are at the same time poets, and poets who are at the same time essayists, writing never more than five or seven hundred words, in which a whole philosophy of life is really expressed by a single line.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

“Read any good books lately?”

One of the young personal trainers hailed me as I entered the gym. He had learned through the grapevine that I was something of a reader, and he wanted to tell me about this counterfactual history series he’d been enjoying. He then mentioned that he used to write short stories when he was “a kid” (he’s all of twenty-four now), but had lost both the skill and the inclination, in his estimation. Well, I said, waving a hand around our environment, it’s not much different than here — it’s mostly perspiration. You have to show up and put in your reps. I suggested that, to get back in the swing of it, he should sit down and blatantly try to imitate some of his favorite writers. More than likely, I said, you won’t be able to do it, but after wrestling with it for a while, you’ll start to discover more of your own voice in the process.

He seemed to think this was some of the greatest advice he’d ever heard. He swore he was going to start doing exactly that. I’m now mentally preparing for him to eventually put two and two together and ask, “Hey, how did you come up with that idea? Are you a writer too? What do you like to write?” What would I tell him? I could say I keep a blog, but you know, I really hate the word “blog.” It sounds like it should describe an involuntary bodily function, or something gross like that. Familiar essays? I don’t really write at enough length to qualify. I guess I’d say, “You know what bonsai sculpture is, right? Well, instead of trees, I do that with essays. I take potential essays and prune them down to around three-to-five hundred words. I call it bonsai minimalism.”

Incidentally, I have decided that my mission here is to convince all of my readers to pick up a copy of Lin Yutang’s book The Importance of Living. His other books may earn you extra credit, but that’s the main one. There is a dearth of Yutang citations among all the neighboring blogs, so I aim to set that right. The quotations will continue until you finally give in. Resistance is futile.

The Choice

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The invention of printing has done more to change the content of the average man’s mind than anything else. That content is one of the most curious and terrifying phenomena of the modern age. We know too much and too little. We all have a mass of information and opinions on world-wide topics, from Hitler’s schizophrenia to Mussolini’s daughter, from the rise of Kemal Pasha to the proper breeding of turkeys. And yet we really know very little on these subjects. What’s in our minds resembles what’s in the town gossip’s, widened to cover the world. It is as if we were looking at a remote landscape through a field glass that brings just enough details to justify all sorts of exciting speculations. We are all suffering from a surfeit of undigested information, and all floating blissfully on the surface of imaginary, and rather undependable, borrowed opinions. Nobody knows anything any more. The more I read the more ignorant I become. The choice today before any educated man is between unread innocence and well-read ignorance.

— Lin Yutang, “500th Anniversary of Printing,” With Love and Irony

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Grant me, indulgent heaven, a rural seat,
Rather contemptible than great;
Where, though I taste life’s sweets, still I may be
Athirst for immortality.
I would have business, but exempt from strife;
A private, but an active, life;
A conscience bold, and punctual to his charge,;
My stock of health, or patience, large.
Some books I’d have, and some acquaintance too,
But very good, and very few.
Then (if one mortal two such grants may crave)
From silent life I’d steal into my grave.

— Nahum Tate, “The Choice”

The Best Social Philosophies

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The best social philosophies do not claim any greater objective than that the individual human beings living under such a regime shall have happy individual lives. If there are social philosophies which deny the happiness of the individual life as the final goal and aim of civilization, those philosophies are the product of a sick and unbalanced mind.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

The Honest Naked Goddess Philosophy

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In an age which suffers from this universal education, to what an unnatural, artificial and in any case unworthy state must the most truthful of all sciences, the honest naked goddess philosophy, be reduced! In such a world of compelled external uniformity it must remain the learned monologue of the solitary walker, the individual’s chance capture, the hidden secret of the chamber, or the harmless chatter of academic old men and children. No one dares venture to fulfill the philosophical law in himself, no one lives philosophically with that simple loyalty that constrained a man of antiquity to bear himself as a Stoic wherever he was, whatever he did, once he had affirmed his loyalty to the Stoa. All modern philosophizing is political and official, limited by governments, churches, academies, customs and the cowardice of men to the appearance of scholarship; it sighs ‘if only’ or knows ‘there once was’ and does nothing else.

— Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, ” Untimely Meditations

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It seems I am destined to become a market philosopher, but it can’t be helped. Philosophy generally seems to be the science of making simple things difficult to understand, but I can conceive of a philosophy which is the science of making difficult things simple. In spite of names like “materialism,” “humanism,” “transcendentalism,” “pluralism,” and all the other longwinded “isms,” I contend that these systems are no deeper than my own philosophy. Life after all is made up of eating and sleeping, of meeting and saying good-bye to friends, of reunions and farewell parties, of tears and laughter, of having a haircut once in two weeks, of watering a potted flower and watching one’s neighbor fall off his roof, and the dressing up of our notions concerning these simple phenomena of life in a kind of academic jargon is nothing but a trick to conceal either an extreme paucity or an extreme vagueness of ideas on the part of the university professors. Philosophy therefore has become a science by means of which we begin more and more to understand less and less about ourselves. What the philosophers have succeeded in is this: the more they talk about it, the more confused we become.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

How to Read a Book

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Luther Ray Abel:

The perfect reading nook exists, I am sure of it. I am confident because I have experienced this nirvana personally. Let me tell you, it feels as if one is supping from the very vessel used during the Last Supper — provided you choose the correct chalice, of course. While many have explored this path before, searching for superiority in literary comfort, and found naught but personal ruin and destruction, the recipe for peak hard- or soft-cover consumption is quite simple. One only needs a plush wingback chair — along with, ideally, a warm fire and a purring cat (or a snoozing dog) nearby.

What, no pipe? Or would that have been a bit much?

Close your ears against this false prophet, friends. This setting is designed to produce naught but narcolepsy. My own counsel would echo that of Lin Yutang — reclining at about a 30-degree angle in bed, propped up on pillows or one of those reading cushions shaped like the top half of a chair. A fire? I’m sorry, am I only allowed to read during the months from November through March? It’s ninety degrees and humid around here; crank up the air conditioning (praise Willis Carrier) and settle back with a book propped on your chest, the way God intended.

Immortal Longings

By in alan watts, books, foolosophy, juxtapositions, lin yutang, the big sleep 1 Comment

What is this joie de vivre that they talk about nowadays? Our hunger for God, our thirst of immortality, of survival, will always stifle in us this pitiful enjoyment of the life that passes and abides not. It is the frenzied love of life, the love that would have life to be unending, that most often urges us to long for death. “If it is true that I am to die utterly,” we say to ourselves, “then once I am annihilated the world has ended so far as I am concerned—it is finished. Why, then, should it not end forthwith, so that no new consciousnesses, doomed to suffer the tormenting illusion of a transient and apparential existence may come into being? If, the illusion of living being shattered, living for the mere sake of living or for the sake of others who are likewise doomed to die, does not satisfy the soul, what is the good of living? Our best remedy is death.” And thus it is that we chant the praises of the never-ending rest because of our dread of it and speak of liberating death.

…And they come seeking to deceive us with a deceit of deceits, telling us that nothing is lost, that everything is transformed, shifts and changes, that not the least particle of matter is annihilated, not the least impulse of energy is lost, and there are some who pretend to console us with this! Futile consolation! It is not my matter or my energy that is the cause of my disquiet, for they are not mine if I myself am not mine—that is, if I am not eternal. No, my longing is not to be submerged in the vast All, in an infinite and eternal Matter or Energy or in God; not to be possessed by God, but to possess Him, to become myself God, yet without ceasing to be I myself, I who am now speaking to you. Tricks of monism avail us nothing; we crave the substance and not the shadow of immortality.

— Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

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That man desires immortality is understandable, but were it not for the influence of the Christian religion, it should never have assumed such a disproportionately large share of our attention. Instead of being a fine reflection, a noble fancy, lying in the poetic realm between fiction and fact, it has become a deadly earnest matter, and in the case of monks, the thought of death, or life after it, has become the main occupation of this life.

…Many people have substituted for this personal immortality, immortality of other kinds, much more convincing—the immortality of the race, and the immortality of work and influence. It is sufficient that when we die, the work we leave behind us continues to influence others and play a part however small, in the life of the community in which we live. We can pluck the flower and throw its petals to the ground and yet its subtle fragrance remains in the air. It is a better, more reasonable, and more unselfish kind of immortality. In this very real sense, may say that Louis Pasteur, Luther Burbank and Thomas Edison are still living among us. What if their bodies are dead, since “body” is nothing but an abstract generalization for a constantly changing combination of chemical constituents! Man begins to see his own life as a drop in an ever flowing river and is glad to contribute his part to the great stream of life. If he were only a little less selfish, he should be quite contented with that.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

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However, in an entirely friendly spirit, I would like to take issue with Alan Harrington’s fascinating article “The Immortalist” (May 1969), on the desirability of abolishing death, and the possibility of doing so through medical techniques.

The immortalization of any biological individual runs into the same logistic problems as building indefinitely high skyscrapers: the lower floors are increasingly taken up with channels for elevators. It’s called “the law of diminishing returns.” A brain that continues intact for 100, 500, or 1,000 years is increasingly clogged with memories, and becomes like a sheet of paper so covered with writing that no space is left for any visible or intelligible form. Thus a human being 500 years old would be as inert as a turtle of the same age.

Consider the following points: (a) Death is not a sickness or disease; it is an event as natural and as healthy as childbirth or as the falling of leaves in the autumn. (b) As the “natural childbirth” obstetricians are training women to experience the pains of labor as erotic tensions, there is no reason why the “pangs of death” should not be reinterpreted as the ecstasies of liberation from anxiety and overloads of memory and responsibility. (c) Suppose that medical science achieves a method of getting rid of the overload of memories and anxieties: Isn’t this what death accomplishes already? (d) The funk about death is the illusion that you are going to experience everlasting darkness and nothingness as if being buried alive. (e) The “nothingness” after death is the same as the “nothingness” before you were born, and because anything that has happened once can happen again you will happen again as you did before, mercifully freed from the boredom of an overloaded memory.

Along with most of us, Alan Harrington doesn’t see that this “nothingness” before birth and after death is simply the temporal equivalent of, say, the space between stars. Where would stars be without spatial intervals between them? The problem is simply that civilized and brainwashed human beings lack the perception that we are all one Self, marvellously varied and indefinitely extended through time and space with restful intervals. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, “it is the silent pause which gives sweetness to the chant.”

— Alan Watts, The Collected Letters of Alan Watts

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