中年的慵懒

中年的慵懒 Middle-age Indolence According to the tradtional thinking of Chinese men of letters, when one turns to 40, it is time for him to write an autobiography. In this century alone, famous autobiograohies like “A Self-portait at the Age of 40” have apeared. As to autobiographical essays, Mr. Yu Pingbo’s “Middle Age” is especially worth mentioning. In the essay, “The green mountains in the remote distance are our final destination,” he said. His possible meaning is : Afer noon, the sun is called the setting sun in the west; therefore we should lose no time in finding a place for our final retirement. Mr. Dong Qiao has also contributed a famous essay entitled “Middle Age is Drinking Tea in the Afternoon”, expressing the same view. Natually, people affected by that kind of mood can’t have any youthful aspirations. What a terrible threshold the age of 40 is to people with old-fashioned thinking! Jing Shengtan made the famous statement: “He who is not yet a government official at the age of 40 should give up trying.” Even more radical, Mr. Qian Xuantong strongly advocated this policy: “all the forty-year olds should be executed.” Such remarks represent either the airing of one’s personal grievances, or attempts at black humour, but they do throw some light on the way in which our compatriots looked at the age of forty and over. Confucius said, “40 is the age when one can be safe from temptations.” Accoring to him, when one is forty or over, he should be able to resist the temptation of a piece of juicy meat dangling before him even if he is very hungry and his mouth is watering. Therefore, Old China was the hotbed for scholars with fossilized ideas. No wonder, lots of men over forty addressed each other as “my revered Mr. So-and-so.” The crux of the problem is: young people, being at the start of their owen career and having to exert themselves to the utmost all the time, are always under the greatest stress and severest strain. The middle-aged people, on the other hand, having accomplished wahtecer they have, may relieve themselves of their ”load”, and start to enjoy a quiet and leisurely life unburdened with any ambitions and away from the storms of life. Consequently, middle-aged persons quickly lapse into indolence. Most famous works that appeared in the past centuries, including the present, were written by authors around 30. Works with any creativeness seldom came from the pen of Chinese authors over 40, except autobiographies and notes by way of annoation. But for writers abroad, age does not seem to affect their energy or imagination at all. Some literary celebrities did not start their career until after 40. Because of various reasons, the life span of us Chinese used to be very short. Hence the old saying “man’s life from old has rarely reached seventy.” Therefore the middle-age period was much earlier, and men of letters very early in their lives became “old” and conservative psychologically. This tradition exerts its influence to this day so that few come to fame during middle age. In actual fact, middle age represents the prime of one’s life, allowing no indolence, no self-indulgence, still less self-glorificaiton in the fact that one is now able to shut oneself up in a closet and kill time by sipping tea leisurely. On the contrary, one should continue the stormy long march started in early youth. As to the search for the road of no return in the green mountains in the distance, that will of course have to be done, but only after one has reached 80