Literature Appreciation：一个偏见/A Prejudice资料文件与下载

A Prejudice

Qian Zhongshu

      Prejudice is aroused when reason goes on vacation, so to speak. It is a dire necessity to the brainless, but the brainy see it as Sunday entertainment. Suppose we held no prejudice—we ' d be dispassionate, fair, serious. We' d be decent ( anytime and anywhere) as if posing for photographs in front of a bathroom mirror or as if building a house with only salons but no bedrooms. In Dante' s Inferno ( Canto 27), the Devil claims he is always " reasonable." This is why Hell is specially made for people like him. So, we don't have to play fair in this world ,as the so-called justice is certainly prejudice in the first place. Besides, it is common knowledge that the human heart is not physiologically centered, but kind of slanted and lefty" ( which is rather faddish). No wonder unorthodox beliefs are called " a road that turns left" in the Chinese classics. Although this is a fact somewhat scientifically established, most of the views people voice (such as the theories we read in a book etc.) are apparent realities interacting with absolute realities" as Dongshan of the Chan sect puts it in The Five Positions. The rest, like the marginalia of life or the letters written when one is madly in love, are all prejudices, straight from the heart, and forcefully expressed. Oh well, this is a big world. Though we face it squarely and fairly with our eyes wide open, we are prone to focus exclusively on limited aspects. When a dog has its eye on a bone, does it ever pay attention to other dogs at its side? As for what we call prejudice in normal circumstances, it is like a marksman shooting with one eye closed. But then there are people who believe that this is a way to target the heart of the matter. For example, Plato defines man as a featherless animal with two feet, which is a judgment mightily sober. However, Diogenes Laertius, a Greek, reports in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers ( VolumeVI, Chapter 2) that a man brought Plato a plucked chicken to challenge that definition. Also, the clown in Mariage de Figaro by Beaumarchais says that man is an animal "drinking when he is not thirsty and making love all year round." We know that this is only a joke cracked by a buffoon who has a liking for wine and women. But we cannot deny that, biased as he might be, what he says is close enough to the bone when it comes to human nature. The prefix" pre-" and the word conception "are always related to each other: the idea that is formed before we know the actual fact is of course a "preconception". One might as well say, "Man is an animal which makes noises day and night and all year round." Yes, why not?

       Birds sing in spring, crickets chirp in fall, and mosquitoes buzz in summer. But bugs stay awake while birds are sleeping at night. And the wind does not howl and the rain does not drum every day. Dogs will never bark if nobody is coming and hens cackle only if they lay eggs. It is man who makes noises at all times and in every place, talking, moving around, or running machines. Even when he is all by himself in a room, he turns on the gramophone or listens to the radio. And he snores like thunder while sleeping. Of course, speech is not noise. But when we get the rough edge of someone' s tongue, or want to shut our ears, or overhear somebody saying something from the next room or in the distance, we take the edge off what we hear, distort it and turn it into hubbub, now rising, now falling, which no longer says much to us, like the cluck of a chicken or the bark of a dog. This is the so-called" human voice." It makes us sleep fitfully, interrupts our train of thought, and gives us a nervous breakdown.

      After all, the human race has power and control over the world. Our voice is the loudest of its kind. All the cries of nature raised in chorus are drowned out by the noise we make when the two of us speak at the same time. At least this rings true to the ear of a third party. An oft-quoted line from Tang Zixi's poem Zuimian goes: "The mountain was as quiet as the world in the distant past." By this. he probably means the period of time before the human race appeared, otherwise the mountain would never be quiet. There would have been monks up the top, tourists at the foot, and restaurants and tea houses halfway up the hill. While the human voice is a mortal blow to peace and quiet, the cries of nature blend in perfectly with it. The wind whistles, the sea ululates. Nature's cries relate to peace and quiet as breezes relate to air and waves to sea. They are two-in-one. Every day when the first hint of steely light casts on the eastern sky, half- awake and half-asleep, we hear that there are hundreds of birds chirruping, extending their greetings to the morning. But the night is staying around. Peace and quiet still lingers on, protecting whatever portions of our dream remained untouched. The twitter of innumerable sparrows is short and quick, as if to peck at the peace and quiet. The chatter of magpies is sharp like a pair of scissors. The squawk of storks is rough as a saw with teeth. All of them try to cut into the peace and quiet over and over again. But the peace and quiet seems to be so deep, so fluid, and so flexible that as soon as the caw of birds has broken its surface open, it replenishes its stock to the rim. Even the crow of a cock, the first herald of dawn, leaves no scratches on it. Little by little, we forget that the twitter of birds has broken the peace and quiet. It seems that the peace and quiet has absorbed and digested the birdsong, and turned it into the sound of silence. But once we hear the kid next-door wailing, the guy upstairs coughing in his sleep, or an early walker passing by outside the wall, the peace and quiet is shattered and dispersed and is all gone, as though it were the soft mist that lifts at sunrise. The human voice is raised , everything is coming back, so we can no longer relax. Whether we are bone-tired in the small hours or while we are racking our brains, the moment violent noises explode even the most loving humanitarian might be seized with a sudden desire to kill, itching to do everybody in, so as to restore silence. In ancient times, observant poets perceived that the cries of nature produced by birds and beasts and wind and waves, etc. complement peace and quiet perfectly. It is written in the Shijing: "The horses are neighing ,the flags are flying." And the next line is: We hear sounds, but no noises." So we see the neigh alone doesn't produce any hubbub as long as nobody is shouting. Moreover, there is an oft- quoted line from one of the poems by Wang Ji: "The more the cicadas sing, the stiller the silence of the woods. The more the birds chirp, the louder the quiet of the mountains becomes." In his Yanshi Jiaxun, Yan Zhitui points out that that is how we feel when "we hear sounds, but no noises." The song of birds and the hum of insects have imposed silence on nature. In To Jane- The Recollection, P. B. Shelley portrays in words: "How calm it was ! the silence there/ By such a chain was bound/That even the busy woodpecker/Made stiller by her sound." In The Eolian Harp, Coleridge writes,  "The stilly murmur of the distant Sea/Tells us of silence." Well, should it have been the sea of human faces, the poet would have gone deaf or suffered a headache . In Chinese , the comparison we often make between hullabaloo and "the caw of crows and the chatter of birds" shows favor to humans after all. It is just that we try to protect our own reputation. Likewise, the comparison we make between the giggles of women and the warble of nightingales and the twitter of swallows" indeed is an insult to the bird.

     Peace and quiet is not muteness. Muteness is a deathly hush. It is not silence. That is why Dante depicts the sun holding its tongue in Hell( dove il sole tace). One might say peace and quiet is an auditory state of transparency, just like one might as well say the notion of emptiness in Buddhism is a visual state of quiet. Quiet makes us aware of the sounds we normally don' t hear. It allows the ethicist to become conscious of the still small voice and the poet to hear the light footfall of dusk or the soft whisper of sprouting grass. The more we hear hubbub ,the less sensitive we are to sounds. The human race enjoys making noises so much that it seems unnatural for a crowd to fall silent, like when we observe a five- minute silence before we start a meeting, or like the occasion of a reunion, we are speechless with emotion, holding the hands of our family and friends whom we haven' t seen for a long time .These are the silences pregnant with the first movements of voices that have not been born yet .

    The human voice is unpleasant for one more reason. Much as traffic drones up and down around our body, it is on the same horizontal plane as we are. But humans make a hell of a racket above us, taking aim at the head. For example, we live downstairs and someone else lives upstairs. His footsteps alone, not to mention others, are enough to make us feel like Aunt Zhao who got kicked in the head in the Hongloumeng. When we have had enough of it, we make one of the following two fervent wishes. We wish we were "the warrior without a head" (cf. the Shanhaijing), letting the head grow beneath the chest, so that it could be saved from being trampled underfoot. Or, we wish the guy living upstairs were some angel like one of those in Christianity. He would never walk with his legs since he had two wings on his back , but nothing beneath the waist. We do mean well! We don ' t want him to take punishment and have his feet chopped off like Sun Bin. We are "a soul injured by hubbub as Rodenbach calls it, but our neighbors don't care. And they don't care about our heads either, do they?

     There is an interrelationship between hullabaloo and heat, stillness and chilliness. Hell is gloomy and frightful, so the sun there is ominously silent. But the clamor of people can turn a chilly room into a cooking pot, which makes us get hot under the collar. This is the reason why Schopenhauer says that the philosopher should turn a deaf ear to what he hears ( Parerga und paralipomena, Section 278) . True, if we aren't deaf, we'll hear noises. And if the noises are loud enough, we'll become hotheaded. Prejudice will replace reason and then we'll be warped . At that moment, we'll forget that we're rowdy animals too. We have kicked the guy downstairs in the head before and we have made a hell of a racket interrupting our neighbors who were trying to concentrate or get some sleep. Still we couldn't care less when people say we’re mightily prejudiced. Instead, we cling to our prejudice, making another annotation in the marginalia of life.