Life proves time and time again: It is difficult to endure. No matter how philosophical a person may be, in the end it is difficult to endure. Fleeing, surrendering, destroying oneself; none of these is to endure. Refusing is also not the same as to endure. To be unable to endure is an aspect of the resoluteness and purity of human nature; it is one of the reasons why humans are endearing. Occasionally, one endures for the purpose of making a final refusal. We should endorse the spirit and attitude of refusal. However, any kind of choice must be completed by being given a form, and that form can be extremely varied.
If a person is infatuated with love, although he appears to be befuddled, he has, in fact, found a path for himself. While others are busy refusing, he has entered into a state of self-forgetting. Self-forgetting is also the result of not being able to endure. He has crossed over the raging path, burning off his anger and resentment. Only then does he enter infatuation. When you love an occupation, a flower, or a person, what you love is a concrete thing; when you love a sensation, or a desire, a piece of land, or a state of being, what you love is abstract. So long as you start from the beginning, so long as you love sincerely, you will be besotted. If you are besotted with love you create an emotional space.
When I cast myself into a stretch of vast, wilderness, I understand that I have turned my back on something which boils furiously and makes my heart tremble. I have walked from the concrete toward the abstract. As I stand amid the fallow fields and raise my eyes to look in all directions, one question cannot be avoided. I reply that I still love. Even though my hair has become disheveled and my clothing is torn, I know that at this moment my heart will be remade, carefully and pristinely. Carrying only a sack on my back, having no lance or spear, I wander back and forth around the fields and in the valleys---the valleys which receive and dispatch the four seasons in their turn. I willingly release my ambitions and exile myself. Heat and cold, sorrow and joy, one after the other they weave a web. I understand even more that I "cannot endure." Throwing aside small pleasures, I walk into my native land. Under the wild grain stalks of autumn a joyful smile comes to my lips.
I only wish that I could cut off the road back so that I would forever linger here. Sometimes beauty and goodness must be protected to the exclusion of all else. You can only watch them grow, wide-eyed. I live in a deeply tranquil, soundless world where I can enjoy peaceful seclusion. I hear my good friends praising my resolve, and my comrades lauding my sacrifice. But for me, it is only that I cannot endure. A single hawthorn tree, a clump of grass, all inspire me to sing. I cannot leave their side; they fascinate me deeply. Amid their light, clear fragrance I am constantly moved. Perhaps they are only a simple, bright, extremely ordinary flower or tree, living creatures of the wilderness, but how genuinely they live!
I erase time; and time does me a favour. Wind and frost wash away the thin, light enthusiasm and leave behind only firm, mature indifference. Standing on this distant, broad expanse of farmland I will never again smell the odour of the distant city. All around are roads leading away, and no one is holding me here, nor is anyone pressing me. Here time becomes expansive, and one's nature slackens of itself. I know that excitement exhausts a person, to the point where he is completely spent. I love the wild country, I love that distant horizon. I become so besotted that no drug can cure me, as though I have entered some gate of mystery. When I lose my sensibilities I can no longer speak and my hand cannot write; my heart is distant and my hand clumsy; sometimes I raise my pen but forget the words. I follow the small paths of my native place out into the wilderness. In a crude hut in a desolate village I force myself to write down a wild song. I did not place these sloping, curved traces of ink in the homemade leather folders of the people of yesteryear. They were wrapped up in a piece of homespun floral cloth and carried over the shoulder.
Since the small floral homespun bundle holds my idiomatic singing, I take it in my hand and continue to walk forward. All along the road I continually read characters. If, as it is said, the form of pictographic characters was originally taken from real objects, then each one of them ought to correspond to every other. So now they can be identified with even more real objects. This kind of interest can be sustained for a long time, and it can only be obtained while in the vast countryside. Time rushes ever by, minute by minute making distinctions between puzzling details. This is the way that I pass my days. I am satisfied by this state of being and its sensations, and with this bliss which is so difficult to express. This bliss is as though stolen.
I know that those things which cannot be endured will eventually disappear, but I also understand that a person is extremely stubborn. For that reason, wise people throughout history have been unimaginably happy once they have let go of themselves. Everything comes to pass so uneventfully, always renewing like the sun. There is inexhaustible content in that renewal.
