Cogito ergo scribo

I mentioned a few weeks back that there would be posts inspired by the old stuff i dug out during my room cleaning. Other than the old school journals and unrealized millennium resolutions, i've also found some screeds that i've written a few yeas ago. Coincidently, one of them was similar to an interesting topic that 贝 and i were chatting about last night, but more about that tomorrow.

I couldn't remember the exact time, but i believe this was written in year 1999 or 2000. Yes, these two years were full of events worth remembering, good or bad. I was rather depressed at that time and had penned down my musings as a way to keep my sanity. Looking back now, i'm glad that i had resorted to writing instead of some destructive avenues to unleash my melancholia.

Today, i'm gonna share one of the scrawls scribbled in Chinese. Although not well-written, it was a reflection of my thoughts and feeling at that time.



I've reproduced it here in a readable form (click on image to enlarge):



Here's the translation in my best effort (minor changes were made because it was simply impossible to translate it word-by-word):

Time always passes without our knowing. It's sad but there's nothing we can do about it. When i was young, there seemed to be an infinity of hope, yet now, hope is the four digits i bought from the lottery agent at one dollar every week.

In the past, i couldn't understand why anyone would spend money on gambling. Now i realize that in this world, maybe there are simply too many people whose hope can only be obtained with money.

My friend didn't understand why i wanted to buy 4D. I told him that it was because there was no hope in my life, and i needed the one-dollar hope to carry on, to look forward to tomorrow's newspaper. Then my friend laughed, telling me that those who buy 4D are in fact people with excessive hope; these people are optimists because they believe in the probability of one out of ten thousands. People who are truly despair would have given up even this slim hope.

Perhaps he was right. I really don't know anymore. I always wonder why growing up would fracture happiness. Is it because the more we know, the less happier we will be? Is it because as we are able to see clearer, we will be disillusioned by the gap between reality and fantasy and thus our happiness disappears as well? As there is a saying (by Lucius Annaeus Seneca), "To be always fortunate, and to pass through life with a soul that has never known sorrow, is to be ignorant of one half of nature".

My friend said i was thinking too much. He believed that children are happy because they possess profound imagination. However, with the coming of age, our imagination was slowly devoured by our pragmatic needs. Living in a world without imagination, we will be whammed by the reality until we can't be happy anymore.

It's funny to see how a pessimist could turn into an optimist as years went by... i guess that's what growing up is all about.

Labels: introspection