尋洋之南。躬耕之境

Nov. 23rd, 2006 -Albert Chou-


7:09 pm. I spent my loneliness in the laboratory finishing up my readings for one of my final papers. Tonight, pedestrians in this town point their finger on one direction: home. I don’t have one here, indeed. When the smell of nostalgia spreads, I am the only one who needs to taste it.

Wired as it sounds, I cannot pen any word in Chinese in this small room that is interconnected to rest of the world. If Thanksgiving is a sort of Chinese New Year to Americans, this is not the first time when I am all by myself. No family, no friends, not even a corner in this town I belong to.

Sometimes, it is not as hopeless as I describe. My isolation ironically satisfies my ambition. I imagine that I am a philosopher king, a chess designed by Plato. He gives me a life, but it turns out that this life most of the time is not in my hand. And yet Plato needs this little creature to struggle. Nietzsche then jumps in Plato’s design. He is a man, not a God, Nietzsche screams out loudly.

Then I am a man. I was, I am and I will still be. I am limited by many dimensions a social animal is limited to. The sense of solitariness is one of those dimensions. Enduring solitariness, however, makes me a philosopher king!! Enduring solitariness, on the other hand, anguishes me. It is a paradoxical process, which is dialectical nevertheless. In the soil of this paradox, I grow up. Then I die. Plato did not fully foresee this development, even though he started it. He started it!

Tonight, in the direction of pursuing knowledge, I am all by myself.