What was essential in the ancient world was that everything we call culture was somehow applicable to everyday life: How can poetry, philosophy, music, painting, calligraphy be made personal, transmuted into the essence of everyday life, that is, how can all this become life itself — will it become my life, in the final analysis, and am I capable of leading my life according to the concepts of a highly refined tradition? In ancient tradition, art, philosophy and life were not sharply differentiated. In today’s world, the connection between tradition and everyday life has been shattered.
He is silent for a long time, like someone wondering whether he has expressed himself precisely and modestly enough. It can be seen, however, that in the silence nothing remains with which he might continue his train of thought, so Stein asks: If things are like this, then what can be done?
tang. Not much. It is possible for us to suppose that we can attempt to modify, transform, change, elevate and make ourselves, as well as the direct reality around us, more valuable. For example, a few of us intellectuals have founded a society on the basis of the old shuyua, where from time to time we conduct dialogues around the possibilities of regenerating the old culture. Here of course there are extraordinary difficulties: on the one hand, the ancient culture is deeply connected to the classical Chinese language. And on the other, particular problems are caused when we use our language of today, even when speaking of the renewal of ancient culture based upon the ancient language.
Stein knows a little about the shuyua: informal, unaffiliated academies where every now and then the illustrious literati gathered and debated questions judged to be of eternal merit. Every attempt to renew this tradition is fantastic, he says, but can it be said that this, or similar attempts, are characteristic of the intelligentsia of today?
tang. The intelligentsia is divided. The ones known in the West as the technical intelligentsia have forged ahead here in China to an extraordinary extent, and they do not have much of a connection with intellectuals in the humanities. Neither with tradition, nor even our own classical tradition. But I have to say that this isn’t such a new development. The situation of classical scholars was always dramatic in China. Things were always just as difficult for truly original thinkers and artists, as they are today — they lived solitary and oppressed in their own times, just as they are solitary and oppressed today.
They drink the tea and look at each other wordlessly. Then Tang Xiaodu bows his head, puts out a cigarette and immediately lights a new one. His shoulders are bent, his fatigue and sadness are evident. He excuses himself for being able to say so little on this topic. Later, when he comes back from the great journey, Stein will have to talk to Ouyang, Xi Chuan and Miss Wang. They know much more about this. They are all here, and introductions are made, but the conversations, as Tang Xiaodu predicts, occur only weeks later.
Because weeks are coming, weeks among the ruins of this long, nightmarish, last remaining ancient civilization.
The Great Journey
1. The First Steps
Not only on 5 May 2002 is Nanjing hopeless; Nanjing is always hopeless, because there is nothing, really nothing that is more hopeless than Nanjing: the endless millions of people, the dark, shabby streets, the pitiless, coarse, crazed traffic, the merciless minibuses with the exhaust streaming out onto the passengers — who can only find a place to sit at the back which, for some mysterious reason, is raised — the exhaust streaming out with such strength that only the most hardened can bear it, or the very exhausted who assume this sacrifice so they may sit down; the whole thing is hell, and the chilly metallic atmosphere on these buses is hellish too, the grimy face of the bus drivers and their filthy white gloves, their immovable, merciless, unshakeable indifference, just hell and hell and grime everywhere, on the walls of the barracks-like houses, on the tables in the restaurants, on the flagstones, on a doorknob, on the side of a teacup, the litter and sticky filth in the back kitchens of the restaurants and the small canteens, the back kitchens that a customer or foreigner is never allowed to enter because they would never believe their eyes if they saw where the meat and the vegetables were being chopped, and they would never eat again; and horrifying as well is the spirit of the so-called new China: as one of its most characteristic signs — in the form of the world’s most dispiriting glittering department stores — stands here on the main street, disgorging the most aggressively nauseating Chinese pop music, it relentlessly attacks from the loudspeakers, and as if every single street and corner in the city has been shot up, really, as if every single nook has been amplified with this sticky, infectious, loathsome phonic monstrosity, and this is only the earth, which is below — because this has not been mentioned yet: the sky, not a word has been said about the sky, that grey block-like heaven above them, heavier than lead, through which the sun never, but never, breaks through, and, even if it does, so much the worse because then it just makes so much more visible what is here on these streets and in the millions and millions of buildings on these streets, in the millions and millions of wretched flats inside, and what is inside this world of innumerable multitudes of writhing, rushing, hurrying, impassive faces — always ready to sell something — and for what are these countless men and women living, indeed, so unfortunate are they — who now, in this era of slackening political pressure, in the indescribable construction-fever of China striving to become a world power — can now be blinded, with the greatest delight, into mistakenly believing that, after the decades of misery, the liberation of selling and buying can bring happy redemption to them — that even if the sun would break through that heaven above, heavier than lead, it would simply bring into the light just what kind of life the people of Nanjing are living, hence the hour of arrival becomes as well the hour when the visitor immediately begins to plan where, but where to go to get out of here; he sits down on the bed in one of the ‘Biedermeier’ rooms in the prohibitively expensive, many-starred hotel, intended as elegant but in every respect counterfeit, he looks out of the window, he sees what is moving down there, and he has already taken out the map, he is already trying to figure out how to get the nearest taxi to the train station, because nothing helps, in vain does he suppress within himself the instinctual desire to escape created by the first impression, deciding to inspect that which according to his knowledge still ‘remains’ of the city after the destruction following the Taiping Uprising[13] — comparable for Europeans only with images of Berlin in 1945—what remains of this city, nearly 2,000 years old; and he finds nothing, in the entire God-given world, nothing, because everything that can be inspected on the basis of its having been restored — from the famous city walls including the Beiji Tower,[14] miserably rebuilt, and the Jiming monastery,[15] in an even more pathetic state, to the renowned Mochou Lake[16] hailing from the Song[17] and Ming[18] dynasties, as well as that copy, built as part of a miniature empire in times past to protect the grave of Zhu Yuanzhang,[19] the most famous emperor of Nanjing — all this causes Stein to fall into the deepest of apathies, for everything is so sad: sad that the monstrous devastation proved, after the Taipings, to be so irreparable; and sad, what the Chinese, murdering one another in the course of civil war, and, chiefly, the unprecedentedly bloodthirsty Japanese[20] did here; but what the man of today had made of this heap of ruins is sad as well, because the countless lies and deceptions and counterfeits are sad, the countless imitations, the ceaseless attempts by the spirit of the present age, in the name of reconstruction, to dredge something up from the illustrious past, to which then the unsuspecting visitor, coming to the city as to a great spectacle, can be led by the unscrupulous and peremptory tourist trade, so it can say to him: So, have a look, here is Nanjing with its 2,000-year-old history — so fatal, and disastrous, because no one can stop this course of development any longer, and no amount of strength can turn it back any more, because what is going on here cannot be remedied, what is happening right here and now cannot be remedied, and it doesn’t help when someone, thanks to unmistakable happenstance — just because, sitting slumped on the bed, he absent-mindedly poked at the Linggu Si monastery[21] on the map in that Biedermeier hotel room — picks himself up and goes there, just as the Linggu Si, destroyed and rebuilt many times over, can be grateful to exactly that same happenstance, for the fact that one part of it, a few hundred metres behind the Wuliang Dian,[22] still exists, just as happenstance earlier led the finger of that person to this exactly distant point in the city; and if possible, it renders — let’s refer to this as the Nanjing experience — even more oppressive, even more dispiriting, for this tiny fragment of the Linggu Si stands there, in the middle of this fraudulent and crumbling modernity built upon a heap of ruins, like a tiny child on the battlefield at twilight, where everyone around him lies dead — they too just stand there, László Stein and the interpreter, they stand in the cold torrential rain, immersed in the undisturbed peace of the inner enclosed courtyards of the monastery, they look at the dainty arches of the pavilion trussing, the ancient, dried-out cypress trees with their peeling trunks, they listen to the quiet steps of the monks appearing now and then on the flagstones, and how, in the centre of the courtyard, even the steady cold rain cannot completely extinguish the tiny arches and smoke of the short incense sticks placed in the enormous sacrificial bronze cauldron, then they return to the city, they pay the bill at the hotel, they head out to the station and, without even thinking about it, they get a ticket for the next train, a train which will take them away from here but which will never erase from their memories that place where, on this occasion, exactly 2,000 years came to an end.