"Chuang Tzu's wife died. When Hui Tzu went to convey his condolences, he found Chuang Tzu sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub and singing. 'You lived with her, she brought up your children and grew old,' said Hui Tzu. 'It should be enough simply not to weep at her death. But pounding on a tub and singing--this is going too far, isn't it?' Chuang Tzu said, 'You're wrong. When she first died, do you think I didn't grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there's been another change and she's dead. It's just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter. Now she's going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don't understand anything about fate. So I stopped.'"This view is perhaps less dismal than that of Lucretius, but fascinating nonetheless. Life is a great mystery full of change; the Tao is the sacred force that flows through Heaven and Earth, and all of the Cosmos, effecting this constant change. It is similar to Aristotle's belief that innumerable atoms of different shapes and sizes are falling through "the void" interacting with one another and formulating all that is in "existence." This, I believe, may have been one of the roots of Epicureanism of which Lucretius was a follower, and probably influenced his beliefs of the nature of things. But I like the Taoist concept better, because it fuses the notions of the material world and imagination--that is, it fuses that which is knowable with that which is unknowable, and I think that may be one of the things that Dr. S is up to in this particular class. It seems to be one of the things that Wallace Steven is up to in his poetry.
After hearing "The Snow Man" recited in class and finding it for myself in our Bible, I was struck with another literary connection: Robert Frost's poem "Desert Places."
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it--it is theirs.All animals are smothered in their lairs.I am too absent-spirited to count;The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
There are similarities in the cold desolation of the two pieces' winterscapes overwhelming the lone human figures. Perhaps this is the void with its cold impersonality of atoms reacting to one another in their endless free fall. And the void must also exist in our minds as Frost's narrator indicates, for he is not scared of the falling night, or the cold sweep of snow, or "empty spaces between stars," but by his "own desert places" that are inside of him. Of course this is what Lucretius is trying to tell us: we need not fear the void, all that we fear in life and after is in our minds, "For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." We, humanity, with our atoms of physical body and our atoms of consciousness are all part of that One thing that is and is not all at once, that vast room where Chuang Tzu's wife rests peacefully.They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
I have also provided the link to Chapter 18 of Supreme Happiness if anyone is interested in reading the rest of the chapter.
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