lin yutang

There’s a Hole In My Bucket List

By in books, lin yutang

Patrick Kurp fields a question from a reader on the topic of which books a person must read before dying. I realize that such questions are more like conversation-starters than literal requests for a prescription, but even so, I think Lin Yutang conclusively answered this one in The Importance of Living:

There can be, therefore, no books that one absolutely must read. For our intellectual interests grow like a tree or flow like a river. So long as there is proper sap, the tree will grow anyhow, and so long as there is fresh current from the spring, the water will flow. When water strikes a granite cliff, it just goes around it; when it finds itself in a pleasant low valley, it stops and meanders there a while; when it finds itself in a deep mountain pond, it is content to stay there; when it finds itself traveling over rapids, it hurries forward. Thus, without any effort or determined aim, it is sure of reaching the sea some day. There are no books in this world that everybody must read, but only books that a person must read at a certain time in a given place under given circumstances and at a given period of his life.

It Is Enough

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy, lin yutang, santutthi

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

— Pascal, Pensées

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What does man want in life? Does he want to change the universe? Time flows for ever; the past cannot be recaptured and the future is uncertain; only the day, the present hour, is a solid good. Perhaps the best way to thank God for the gift of living is to appreciate the present hour, to sit quietly and hear your own breathing and look out on the universe and be content. One can see time flow sometimes; one does not have to do something to pass the time; time can pass by itself. And there is infinite pleasure in watching the color of the day change from hour to hour and being able to say to oneself, “I have passed a perfectly leisurely afternoon.” Such perfect afternoons are entirely possible. There is no intrusion upon one’s solitude — not one telephone call, no television — one sees from the window only a child falling and bruising her leg, nothing serious, and young lovers and middle-aged couples sitting quietly on benches under trees. The world goes by. It is enough.

— Lin Yutang, On the Wisdom of America

Choose Your Illusion

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy, lin yutang

Illusions are necessary to human life. They are what make life endurable. Strip the world of illusions, and we have nothing to live for….Without illusions, there would be no love, no art, no religion.

— Lin Yutang, Looking Beyond

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Illusions cannot be condemned, despised, and persecuted save by those who are deluded and by those who believe that this world is or truly can be something, and something beautiful.  An utterly crucial illusion, and so the half-philosopher combats illusions precisely because he is deluded; the true philosopher loves them and proclaims them because he is not deluded, and combating illusions in general is the surest sign of very imperfect and insufficient wisdom, and notable illusion.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

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That is why this man, who lost his only son a few months ago and was so troubled and oppressed this morning by lawsuits and quarrels, is not thinking about it any more. Do not be surprised; he is concentrating all his attention on which way the boar will go that his dogs have been pursuing for the past six hours. That is all he needs. However sad a man may be, if you can persuade him to take up some diversion he will be happy while it lasts, and however happy a man may be, if he lacks diversion and has no absorbing passion or entertainment to keep boredom away, he will soon be depressed and unhappy. Without diversion there is no joy, with diversion there is no sadness.

— Pascal, Pensées

The Patchwork Quilt Theory of Desire

By in books, foolosophy, lin yutang

For if we love a woman, we do not love her geometrical precision of features, but rather her ways and gestures in motion, her looks and smiles. But are a woman’s looks and smiles physical or spiritual? No one can say.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

Proust has a moment in The Captive that I think of often. Albertine bursts into the narrator’s room in a rush of tenderness, declares her devotion, practically throws herself at him. Then the narrator supplies the explanation: this happened on mornings when he had shaved. On first reading, the line sounds like a sneer: Albertine is too dim to notice what’s really happening in her own heart. She mistakes the tactile pleasure of a smooth cheek for admiration of “moral qualities.” The narrator classifies her like a bug pinned to a corkboard. But he’s also confessing something about himself. He wants love to be reducible. A love that can be summoned is a love that can be managed. If her devotion is only a sensory cue, then it’s a mechanism. And mechanism can be exploited.

Lin Yutang notices the same basic fact, how attraction often begins in small, bodily, ordinary particulars, but without the contempt. He adds the intangibles to that fact: the grace of motion, the rhythm of a laugh, the way someone inhabits a room, the imperfections that make someone real. Love is an emergent property from humble origins, not reducible to any one of them.

I clearly remember standing in a Spencer’s Gifts as a teenager, flipping through posters with my friends. We landed on the swimsuit supermodels and made the obligatory teenage-boy noises of approval. And then, in real time, I felt suddenly self-conscious. Elle MacPherson, Stephanie Seymour and Kathy Ireland weren’t ugly, of course, but that whole sultry-playmate look was too clichéd to evoke genuine desire in me. I was aware that I was performing a role I’d been taught, just like they were performing a media representation of a sex symbol. Why did I instinctively go along with it? Because I wanted to fit in with my friends, and I didn’t want them to call me gay. I felt like one of Pavlov’s dogs, being trained to salivate on cue, and I resented the manipulation.

Some of our strongest passions are stitched together out of contingencies: sensory cues, timing, novelty, fatigue, relief, status, imitation. The peer group can steer what you say you want; the body can steer what you think you want; the mind supplies a coherent story after the fact. None of this “debunks” love, unless you’re committed to the idea that love must arrive fully formed from the heavens, a predestined communion of two souls. I don’t believe that. I think it’s just as inspiring — more so, frankly — to realize that something profound can start from prosaic beginnings and become real by accumulation. The romance is that it can be made on earth without needing to be written in the stars: attention, habit, shared time, kindness, repair, a thousand small choices — threads that look trivial in isolation and warm you when they’re woven together.

Obiter Scripta, no. 155

By in aphorisms, books, lin yutang, obiter scripta

All thoughts come in flashes. They should stand by themselves. When they are expanded, they lose some of the force of the original thoughts.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Understanding

This explains my whole style. I’ve tried to stop, honestly. I’ve tried to become a respectable long-form thinker. But the moment I start “developing” an idea, it loses something. So I don’t write essays. I’m an intellectual flasher. I expose a brief idea in public and then immediately close my trench coat and flee before someone can demand citations.

The Chair Repair Republic

By in books, foolosophy, lin yutang

When a man gets frightened or unhappy about the United Nations or the problems of world peace, and wants to recover his happiness, the best thing to do is find some choked kitchen drain and try to clear it. There is hardly a man on earth who is not proud when he sees the water go down the sink smoothly with a clear gurgle as the result of his morning’s labor. Or, instead of committing suicide over the tragedy of Czechoslovakia, one should find out if there isn’t a shaky chair in the house and see if he can’t fix it and make it safe to sit on again. After all, one can save the future of Czechoslovakia only by saving oneself and keeping oneself happy and alive first. The sovereign remedy for world chaos seems to be to provide every household with a hammer and a monkey wrench and a plentiful supply of nails.

— Lin Yutang, The Best of an Old Friend

A man who can’t unclog a sink but is “following world events closely” is basically worshiping abstraction. He has outsourced his sense of agency to headlines. You could substitute Czechoslovakia with Gaza or Greenland, and world peace with ICE, and the lesson stays the same. If we’re realistic about our position in the world, most have us have no power, influence, or money to “change the world” with. As individuals, we can at best be a perfectly placed rivet in a skyscraper, and that doesn’t seem like much, but you might notice a dramatic difference if it weren’t there.

But even Lin’s point isn’t “don’t care about the world,” it’s “stop confusing agitation with agency.” World-scale crises can matter deeply and still be beyond your reach. If you let your nervous system live on a steady diet of catastrophe, you end up trading responsibility for spectacle and calling it virtue. The drain and the shaky chair are a kind of triage: they pull you back into a realm where cause and effect are real, where competence is measurable, and where you can actually keep yourself steady, functional, and sane. Attention isn’t power, and outrage isn’t influence; but a household, a neighborhood, a job done well, a person helped — these are places where your actions register. Get your own water running cleanly first, and you’ll be in a position to be the symbolic rivet you can realistically be, instead of the trembling spectator of events you can’t change.

To the Mind Through the Stomach

By in books, education, foolosophy, lin yutang

A “scholar’s” writing consists of borrowings from other scholars, and the more authorities and sources he quotes, the more of a “scholar” he appears. A thinker’s writing consists of borrowings from ideas in his own intestines, and the greater thinker a man is, the more he depends on his own intestinal juice. A scholar is like a raven feeding its young that spits out what it has eaten from the mouth. A thinker is like a silkworm which gives us not mulberry leaves, but silk.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

Lin wrote before we started talking about the gut like a parliament of microbes, but the metaphor only gets nastier and better. Most minds are ecosystems: some are rich with good flora, others are overrun with citation-bacteria that turn every sentence into gas. The difference isn’t whether you borrow. Everyone borrows. It’s whether you ferment. The scholar tends to preserve: he jars the past neatly and labels it. The thinker allows a controlled spoilage. He leaves ideas in the dark long enough for them to change, for sweetness to become bite, for borrowed sugar to turn into alcohol. That’s why some writing tastes “alive” and some tastes “safe.” One has a living culture in it; the other has been sterilized to survive committee review.

He mentions raven and silkworm; you can think of others. There is the ruminant scholar, solemnly chewing the same cud until it becomes an approved doctrine; there is the tapeworm scholar, living off other people’s meals while contributing nothing but appetite. But there is also the bee-scholar, worth defending: he gathers widely and gives honey.

I’m not a great thinker by any means, but I’ve found meal-planning essential if I want to keep up any decent supply of “intestinal juice.” Left to myself, I’ll snack on whatever’s loudest and sweetest and call it dinner. So here’s a sample menu for humane digestion and steady mental recomposition. For protein, a small serving of Nietzsche — spicy meatball material, best taken in bites, not by the bowl, unless you want to be up at 3 a.m. arguing with God — followed by Isaiah Berlin as the corrective salad that keeps you honest and un-drunk on your own rhetoric. Tolstoy is the slow-cooker stew: a once-or-twice-a-week meal that leaves you full, moral, and slightly inclined to judge your own life. Eric Hoffer is plain, sturdy carbs: beans-and-rice prose. Not fancy, not frosted, but it sticks to the ribs and does what it came to do. Montaigne is the daily bread and cheese: steady, companionable calories that keep you from getting weird. Henry James is the fibrous greens: you chew longer than you think you should, and then you notice your attention has gotten stronger. Samuel Johnson is roast beef and strong tea, for days when your mind needs to sit up straight. Proust is the weekend prix fixe: you don’t do it on a rushed Tuesday, but when you do, the aftertaste lasts for days. And Wodehouse — Wodehouse is sponge cake and champagne. Almost no nutritional claims, just joy and fizz and impeccable timing: a palate-cleanser that keeps the whole regimen from turning into a penitential diet.

Charm and Flavor

By in books, foolosophy, lin yutang

The best formula for the object of reading, in my opinion, was stated by Huang Shanku, a Sung poet and friend of Su Tungp’o. He said, “A scholar who hasn’t read anything for three days feels that his talk has no flavor (becomes insipid), and his own face becomes hateful to look at (in the mirror).” What he means, of course, is that reading gives a man a certain charm and flavor, which is the entire object of reading, and only reading with this object can be called an art. One doesn’t read to “improve one’s mind,” because when one begins to think of improving his mind, all the pleasure of reading is gone. He is the type of person who says to himself: “I must read Shakespeare, and I must read Sophocles, and I must read the entire Five Foot Shelf of Dr. Eliot, so I can become an educated man.” I’m sure that man will never become educated. He will force himself one evening to read Shakespeare’s Hamlet and come away, as if from a bad dream, with no greater benefit than that he is able to say that he has “read” Hamlet. Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading. This type of reading with a business purpose is in no way different from a senator’s reading up of files and reports before he makes a speech. It is asking for business advice and information, and not reading at all.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

When I don’t read (and write) at least a little, I start to feel stale like week-old bread. In some sense, then, it’s a selfish compulsion, but few if any human activities are completely selfless. It’s more realistic to harness vices to better ends than seek to eliminate them.

At first glance, reading for “charm and flavor” can sound shallow, like reading as a way to pick up chicks, or make yourself more interesting at parties. But the common alternative isn’t so much reading for the “right” reason as something even shallower: reading as a grim self-improvement chore, a dutiful march through the “important books” so you can feel properly educated.

“Charm,” in his sense, isn’t really performance. It’s closer to presence: keeping your sensibility limber, so you notice more, say truer things, tell a story better, listen better. There’s a little aspiration in that, sure, but it’s the kind that’s hard to dislike. Like dressing decently, or having good manners. Not a claim to superiority, just a way of being easier to live with and more pleasant to be around. And if reading gives us a bit more flavor, then recommending a book you love is a small way of sharing the meal.

Our Own Prisons

By in books, foolosophy, lin yutang

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighborhood.  From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what that ancient author looked like and what type of person he was. Now to be able to live two hours out of twelve in a different world and take one’s thoughts off the claims of the immediate present is, of course, a privilege to be envied by people shut up in their bodily prison. Such a change of environment is really similar to travel in its psychological effect.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

Lin’s image of the non-reader as “imprisoned in his immediate world” can sound like the usual literary snobbery, as if people who don’t read are just empty rooms with the lights off. That’s not quite right. I’ve known plenty of people who rarely open a book and yet have an inner life that runs on talk, work, hobbies, family gossip, or just steady contentment. For me, though, the metaphor fits uncomfortably well. When I’m not reading or writing anything that grips me, I don’t become serenely Taoist; I turn into a zombie going through the motions of existence. Conversely, I can chase after new books or ideas with all the undisciplined joy of a dog after squirrels. Other people can happily spend the afternoon dozing in a sunbeam like a cat, or get their novelty from shopping, scrolling, or watching television. I seem to need a different kind of stimulus, the feeling of being led by a voice on the page into another mind, another time. It’s a difference of degree rather than kind. A man content to pass the time in a rocking chair on the front porch might see me as enslaved to my books and laptop, unable to sit quietly and just be.

Milgram’s Regress

By in books, foolosophy, lin yutang

The good thing about material progress is that we can do something about it. Science and technology make it possible in the modern world. We can have better sanitation, better drinking water, better lighting, more power to replace manual labor, better fertilizers, perhaps even better can openers. We can build better and more roads. Because these things are obvious, we usually have them in mind when we speak about modern progress of a nation. Besides, technological progress cannot be stopped, and there is no point in resisting material progress.

Not so with moral progress. You cannot do anything about it. You cannot improve the mental and moral qualities of men as easily as you increase the mileage of concrete highways or the speed of airplanes. It is a truism to say that the world is threatened with disaster because man’s moral progress does not keep pace with his material progress. After the engineers have changed the face of the earth, men are very much the same as their forefathers were centuries ago. We are lucky if we can consider ourselves not much worse than our forefathers in human qualities, in honesty, valor, compassion, and wisdom. These things simply do not “progress” that way.

— Lin Yutang, The Pleasures of a Nonconformist

Material progress is a cumulative, technical process. Moral progress is a “vibe” — impossible to clearly discern or define, whatever Steven Pinker might say to the contrary. We can widen a highway on a schedule; we can’t widen a conscience easily, if at all. Yutang’s point is perennial: better pumps and brighter bulbs don’t renovate the dark corners of the human heart. Speaking of which…

Aristotle would say the truth of the matter isn’t a stark contrast between reason and intuition as polar opposites, but a mean: reasonableness between two vices. On one side, impulse/superstition; on the other, hyper-rationality that treats people like variables. The virtue that hits this midpoint isn’t IQ; it’s phronēsis — practical wisdom.

But sentiment alone isn’t safe either. Our warmest moral intuitions scale fast into cold tribal math: loyalty can become chauvinism, solidarity can metastasize into xenophobia. So we need productive tension — reason to universalize and check parochial heat; sentiment to humanize and check abstract schemes. James Madison’s checks and balances inside a single soul: Adam Smith’s “sympathy” vetoing clever cruelties; reason cross-examining the crowd’s passions. That quibble aside, Rufo’s point holds too: morality doesn’t “progress” like tech, yet it’s the ballast that keeps our hot-air thought balloons from disappearing into the ether.

When to Read

By in books, lin yutang

One should read the classics in winter, because then one’s mind is more concentrated; read history in summer, because one has more time; read the ancient philosophers in autumn, because they have such charming ideas; and read the collected works of later authors in spring, because then Nature is coming back to life.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

This year, my big reading project is going to be The Story of Civilization, by Will and Ariel Durant. I’ve encountered single volumes many times over the years, and I’ve always been impressed by the scope of the undertaking, as well as the prose style, which I like to call “mid-century middlebrow.” It’s from a time when it was naturally assumed to make sense to write an eleven-volume summary of Western civilization aimed at a general audience who would of course be interested to read such a thing for the sake of general knowledge. O tempora, o mores! Anyway, eleven volumes — one a month, to finish the whole thing this year? We’ll see.

Complexity Appeals to Stupid People

By in bricolage, foolosophy, lin yutang

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

By in books, foolosophy, lin yutang, socmed

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

By in books, bricolage, jests japes jokes jollies, lin yutang

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

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy, lin yutang

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

By in books, lin yutang, writing

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.

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