Sleepless at 4am, helpless meditation. So I started to think about pain and suffering in literature.
Blank. Can not think of anything but pain. Pain has an element of blank… Emily Dickson… It cannot recollect…
But about suffering? Aren’t sympathy and humanity the teaching of the sages? Have they not experienced the physical pain? Or the enlightened have a higher tolerance of pain and suffering?
It is 4:08… Pain of a needle… Mom and button…
And soon we part with pain… sail again… Thomas Moore…
Pain has an element of blank
Emily Dickson
Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there was
A time when it was not.
It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.
The Meeting of the Ships
Thomas Moore
When o’er the silent seas alone,
For days and nights we’ve cheerless gone,
Oh, they who’ve felt it know how sweet,
Some sunny morn a sail to meet.
Sparkling at once is ev’ry eye,
“Ship ahoy! ship ahoy!” our joyful cry;
While answering back the sounds we hear,
“Ship ahoy! ship ahoy! what cheer? what cheer?”
Then sails are back’d, we nearer come,
Kind words are said of friends and home;
And soon, too soon, we part with pain,
To sail o’er silent seas again.
Beijing, 1968, every day at 4:08pm there’s a train leaving with hundreds of Rusticated Youth or Zhiqing as part of the Down to The Countryside Movement. When the train slowly bears off the station, if you watch any of the films recording the great revolution, the youths reach out of the window with their red faces as well waxed apples waving the Red Book and shouting the slogan ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ with the highest of their trim young voices.
The reality is very different. When the train slowly bears off the station, inside the crowded compartment and on the sadden platform, there is no other sound but crying, there is no other scene by tears in eyes and in heart. For the gray haired parents sending off the children to villages thousands of miles away from home, this might be the last sight of their beloved, most of them still in their teens just finished high school.
On a gloomy December afternoon in 1968, as the train is speeding up and the parents and their tears and blood are fading together with the whole Beijing city into the setting pale sun, under the dim light in the railcar, a twenty years old young man Gu Lusheng writes down several lines to record the historical moment.
It’s Beijing at 4:08;
The sea of hands waving:
It’s Beijing at 4:08;
A sharp whistle;
The tall buildings at Beijing railway station;
Suddenly began to rattle.
I looked out startled;
Not knowing what has happened.
All of a sudden, my heart was attacked by pain, that must be;
Mom’s needle shot through my chest;
At this moment, my heart becomes a kite;
The string ties at mom’s hand.
这是四点零八分的北京
一片手的海浪翻动
这是四点零八分的北京
一声尖厉的汽笛长鸣
北京车站高大的建筑
突然一阵剧烈地科动
我吃惊地望着窗外
不知发生了什么事情
我的心骤然一阵疼痛，一定是
妈妈缀扣子的针线穿透了心胸
这时，我的心变成了一只风筝
风筝的线绳就在妈妈的手中
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