酷我-北美枫

[timmid]

Life Is a Fallacy

I cannot remember when and how we got to know each other. Maybe the tie between town fellows, or the magic of his personality was such that I came into an immediate and continuous relationship with him. Our rapport was genuine, not a small talk kind of thing, which made it so much better to remember him, even some particulars.

He was then, not to exaggerate, the ideal of most girls in out grade. Liberated from the shackle of the college entrance exam, the students suddenly found their previously repressed yearning for romance highly on their agenda. SISU featured the disproportion between girls and boys -- the girls outnumbered the boys by an enormous margin-- which triggered a rush among the girls whenever they found calf-love a nice try. Cupid’s arrow was on the string all along. It was but a matter of when and how to discharge it. He was the target, but he kept as he was, as if unaware of the purposeful tenderness welling in the eyes around him. After several frustrated attempts, the girls resentfully rumored that he was so idiotic as not to have an eye for that, and decided to save themselves from a one sided love. It proved to be a hard decision. In the end, he faded out of the girls’ attention and was taken as he was.

We sometimes picked up the topic, partly for fun, partly for the sake of curiosity.

One day, he slumped against the wall, putting himself in a comfortable position, with legs crossed on the communal table and eyes staring somewhere around me. Slowly but in a refined way, he started the conversation, as if drawing something out of the depth of his memory.

“One morning in middle school, while I was doing some reading in the open air, I cocked my head for a yaw, sighted her in the misty distance, and never cast my eyes elsewhere.”

It was a fantastic start, which caught me, like a drink with which I wanted desperately to quench my thirst on such a stuffy day.

“What is next?” I asked, fancying the fairness of that girl he would reveal.

“She passed me, heading for the teaching building.”

“You should not have been such a fool as not to follow her,” I said, a little impatient out of dissatisfaction.

“I did not.” He said with a tricky smile, lighting a cigarette, vivid patterns of smoke puffing up.

“Damn it—anyway, how is she? Should be pretty?”

“I do not know. She was at such a distance and I just saw her profile”

“Then what the hell are you driving at?” I found myself in his trap to the neck, irritated.

“Keep things at an appropriate distance. I advise you!”

“Bullshit. You were fooling me and you made it” I was almost flying into a rage.

“Do not take it to heart. What even if I was fooling you? Life is fooling all of us!” he challenged me.

I could say nothing but “do not pretend to be deep, we are still wet behind our ears!”

However, he had his own way. He said that he had gone through thick and thin, which resulted in his pessimistic philosophy of life: love is a fallacy; so is life. His reading and reflection led him farther in that direction. Not seldom I heard “bang” made by his fist against the communal table, followed by things like “life is a stage, but the role is badly cast.” The most beautiful picture as he once described it was “an inflated balloon drifts back and forth, up and down as the wind blows, as if there were electricity in the air. At long length, it bursts and vanishes.” Things like these captured most of his eyesight, while concepts like the following occupied much of his insight: “ Humans are shabby actors who strut and trot on the stage of life for a while and disappear for ever.”

His experience also had a dual influence on him: it opened the door for him towards others, and held him back at the same time in his unknown recess. He was more a solitary being than a social being--- that was the way we felt him, and maybe that was the source of his magic, especially towards girls.

A sense of uncertainty haunted him, such that he could not be self-reliant although he tried desperately for a way out. He should have had a longing in disguise for others’ help, especially that from the opposite ., but the fear of the would-be-embarrassing-and–fruitless results set a gap which he proved incapable of conquering. Pity that the girls did not penetrate the mask and make their way towards the subtle truth that he might begin with resisting their advances but end with blocking their retreat. They dropped out of the cat-mouse game, saying he was too aloof to approach. Otherwise, they would have hung on there and been 100 times more daring.

He was a person of few words, especially when called upon for a sudden opinion; he was always brief and embarrassed. Only among acquaintances where he might not be so reserved, did he display his colloquial and reasoning talents--- he won most of our dorm arguments, either by his fluency or the strength of his reason, or the combination of the two.

We nicknamed him philosopher, but that did not make sense. We all knew that life is from cradle to grave, but how it works was beyond our knowledge for there are ups and downs, happiness and sadness in life, as luck would have it. He was virtually sandwiched between his ideal and the reality. He went out of his way for intimacy with either but eventually found himself fallen between the two; then he tried to keep away from anything to do with either.

Some incidents spurred his degradation: towards the end of the third year, he broke with some authority and was disposed from his position in the student union the next day. Without knowing that beforehand, we behaved ourselves, but he did not. He was upset, as if he suddenly became an inborn star who was to play a magnificent role. His days were gone, the awareness of which might give a fatal swoop to his ambition and sense of superiority. He must have found it a hard time, for he was so used to being somebody. Finally, in a pretended tone of a good loser, he declared that he was kicked out of the game. He even twisted his face into a forced smile and folded his hands in a defending position. I still could not see through the depth of his eyes, but there should have been torrents foaming and rambling under the superficial serenity. Then he vented his anger towards that authority; the injustice inflicted on him--. However, our scant response dampened his eagerness of turning back to his fellows whom he previously had turned up his nose to. We said something to console him who he might take as crocodile tears and in which his oversensitive ears might distinguish a tinge of indifference and irony. He then retreated to silence, which disturbed the rest of us. We cancelled our usual talks after suppers and tried not to challenge him though he now seemed no challenge at all. Later, the suffocating atmosphere of disharmony drove some out of the dorm.

I went up to him, patting him on the shoulder, prefacing my consolation with a sigh. “I want home.” He snuffled, which made me stop at the sigh. I knew he was defeated, down and out. He locked himself out on the balcony for the whole night, with a bottle of white sprites, a little salted vegetable and two loaves of bread, with stars twinkling, silence prevailing and lights fading into the depth of darkness. He was left alone in a loser’s solitude; his silence might subside in him as fast as does the celebrated throb of his pulse: he should not have quarreled with that authority, given his furious feelings uncontrolled play---anyway, he was compelled by his disposition. Now he had the taste of indulging his passion. As the wine he was enjoying, it seemed, on swallowing, warm and tasty; its after flavor metallic and corroding, might give him a sensation of being poisoned. For god’s sake, give him some replacement to remedy this injury!

God did it. He was going to extremes, though we did not know when and how he became so. He indulged in gambling, and in due time went from an apprentice to a skilled gambler to master. Most of the time he could spare from gambling he devoted to the adornment of his person-it was something to see him peering at himself in the mirror, adjusting and readjusting his patience. He was frequently seen in video game rooms, bars, sometimes alone, sometimes in a noisy crowd, which he found agreeable company, and of which he became and immediate member. Of course, he was now much better informed of the world- whenever there was a fuss, he would be one of the first purveyors, and whatever was a fashion, he would be among its first practitioners. He liked anything but study, becoming a frequent absentee from class whose performance went from bad to worse- he could not help himself, we said that his home took him back.

Finally came the time he was caught on spot when stealing. We were dragged out of a dream by an uproar in the doorway, then fierce knocking at the door, and then there he was, escorted by cops, hands tied, jaw suspended, eyes beaten blue, cheeks swollen, wearing an expression of a hangdog. The cops searched his drawers and took him away in surrounding chaos. He was gone, leaving a legend on campus.



He said it: life is to live day by day, yet he had not the fortune to witness what dissipation we indulged in the remainder of our college life. Exams, even band eight meant nothing to the graduates because a job, whether decent or not, was at hand; then what the hell need we to strive for? If anything, we explored infinite pleasure in playing cards, chatting into the small hours. When an unfathomable chord was touched, we would sneak out to a bar, got small dishes and drink until we were like whisky bottles, only neck and belly, and no head. Time dragged on in the duplication of such cheap pleasures. Anyhow, we were bachelors, whether those who had made love to more than one innocent girl in SISU, yet still had the art to keep single, or those who whenever facing a girl, would flush and blush, murmur and mutter, yet still had the perseverance of hammering themselves in repeated torture of this kind, o r those who wanted desperately to cal the attention of the girls, yet even their vague eyesight meeting theirs would scare them away.

Our dorm talks revolved about girls; thereafter, the only family man in our dorm became the victim of our curiosity: he had to report to us the details of his affair. Seven Vs one, the force was so unbalanced. We would pick at him when we were not satisfied with his report, throwing him on his bed. Despite his incessant asking forgiveness, we would control his limbs, torture him by itching, kneading, rolling, and let him laugh between pain and fun. After we let him go, we would, one after another, throw our weight on him, leaving him to the point of gasping. When he got over it, we would have a concerted trademark of laughter, which once stunned our teacher, commenting, “it can not be laughter by humans, but whining from hell.”

Our neighbors, the students in lower grades, believed that we were a lost generation and we thought of them like wise. We sometimes made fools of them, saying, “we were what you are, and you will be what we are.” And we were greatly satisfied at their bewildered expression, cheering to each other for being philosophers.

Sometimes, he stole into our conversation. Out of an indescribable state of sensation, we would say that he made it- he won a notorious win and a notorious loss: he proposed well and god disposed him well since he at least had been the hero in a spotlit drama, strutting and trotting for a while. We were not so lucky. He then would be a preface, from which sprang our complaints about the injustice of the current system, about our vain ambition-as if we were the sages who were ready to shoulder whatever obligation to advance china, but it fell on the philistines. Then we would wind up, saying that we were the same as he; the only difference lay in degree.

In my memory, that was a bleak season despite those hustles and bustles. A couple of months before e our graduation, while the students, crowded in the cinema were applauding the presence of a singer on campus who made her reputation overnight, a boy committed suicide. Rumor said that he was not himself that night, running upstairs and down stairs, only with shorts on. Eventually he threw himself down from the banister on the fourth floor- the height might give him the grandeur of a martyr’s death if he made it in daytime, but he still made a delayed highlight. The first witness said he saw a mass thud falling on the ground. When he drew closer, he found it a man, bleeding, struggling, gasping, reach his hand to the witness, begging in a hoarse voice “H-E-L-P”, and then cringe back, dead. “Damn it, how can a person perish that way?” the witness cursed.

That, together with the death of a girl several days later, spiced the days and added material to our conversations. We said that he had a standing impact.

He was in jail, two more died, and we were to live in another way---we all graduated in our respective ways.
_________________
无话可说

[[timmmid]]

Life Is a Fallacy

I cannot remember when and how we got to know each other. Maybe the tie between town fellows, or the magic of his personality was such that I came into an immediate and continuous relationship with him. Our rapport was genuine, not a small talk kind of thing, which made it so much better to remember him, even some particulars.

He was then, not to exaggerate, the ideal of most girls in out grade. Liberated from the shackle of the college entrance exam, the students suddenly found their previously repressed yearning for romance highly on their agenda. SISU featured the disproportion between girls and boys -- the girls outnumbered the boys by an enormous margin-- which triggered a rush among the girls whenever they found calf-love a nice try. Cupid’s arrow was on the string all along. It was but a matter of when and how to discharge it. He was the target, but he kept as he was, as if unaware of the purposeful tenderness welling in the eyes around him. After several frustrated attempts, the girls resentfully rumored that he was so idiotic as not to have an eye for that, and decided to save themselves from a one sided love. It proved to be a hard decision. In the end, he faded out of the girls’ attention and was taken as he was.

We sometimes picked up the topic, partly for fun, partly for the sake of curiosity.

One day, he slumped against the wall, putting himself in a comfortable position, with legs crossed on the communal table and eyes staring somewhere around me. Slowly but in a refined way, he started the conversation, as if drawing something out of the depth of his memory.

“One morning in middle school, while I was doing some reading in the open air, I cocked my head for a yaw, sighted her in the misty distance, and never cast my eyes elsewhere.”

It was a fantastic start, which caught me, like a drink with which I wanted desperately to quench my thirst on such a stuffy day.

“What is next?” I asked, fancying the fairness of that girl he would reveal.

“She passed me, heading for the teaching building.”

“You should not have been such a fool as not to follow her,” I said, a little impatient out of dissatisfaction.

“I did not.” He said with a tricky smile, lighting a cigarette, vivid patterns of smoke puffing up.

“Damn it—anyway, how is she? Should be pretty?”

“I do not know. She was at such a distance and I just saw her profile”

“Then what the hell are you driving at?” I found myself in his trap to the neck, irritated.

“Keep things at an appropriate distance. I advise you!”

“Bullshit. You were fooling me and you made it” I was almost flying into a rage.

“Do not take it to heart. What even if I was fooling you? Life is fooling all of us!” he challenged me.

I could say nothing but “do not pretend to be deep, we are still wet behind our ears!”

However, he had his own way. He said that he had gone through thick and thin, which resulted in his pessimistic philosophy of life: love is a fallacy; so is life. His reading and reflection led him farther in that direction. Not seldom I heard “bang” made by his fist against the communal table, followed by things like “life is a stage, but the role is badly cast.” The most beautiful picture as he once described it was “an inflated balloon drifts back and forth, up and down as the wind blows, as if there were electricity in the air. At long length, it bursts and vanishes.” Things like these captured most of his eyesight, while concepts like the following occupied much of his insight: “ Humans are shabby actors who strut and trot on the stage of life for a while and disappear for ever.”

His experience also had a dual influence on him: it opened the door for him towards others, and held him back at the same time in his unknown recess. He was more a solitary being than a social being--- that was the way we felt him, and maybe that was the source of his magic, especially towards girls.

A sense of uncertainty haunted him, such that he could not be self-reliant although he tried desperately for a way out. He should have had a longing in disguise for others’ help, especially that from the opposite ., but the fear of the would-be-embarrassing-and–fruitless results set a gap which he proved incapable of conquering. Pity that the girls did not penetrate the mask and make their way towards the subtle truth that he might begin with resisting their advances but end with blocking their retreat. They dropped out of the cat-mouse game, saying he was too aloof to approach. Otherwise, they would have hung on there and been 100 times more daring.

He was a person of few words, especially when called upon for a sudden opinion; he was always brief and embarrassed. Only among acquaintances where he might not be so reserved, did he display his colloquial and reasoning talents--- he won most of our dorm arguments, either by his fluency or the strength of his reason, or the combination of the two.

We nicknamed him philosopher, but that did not make sense. We all knew that life is from cradle to grave, but how it works was beyond our knowledge for there are ups and downs, happiness and sadness in life, as luck would have it. He was virtually sandwiched between his ideal and the reality. He went out of his way for intimacy with either but eventually found himself fallen between the two; then he tried to keep away from anything to do with either.

Some incidents spurred his degradation: towards the end of the third year, he broke with some authority and was disposed from his position in the student union the next day. Without knowing that beforehand, we behaved ourselves, but he did not. He was upset, as if he suddenly became an inborn star who was to play a magnificent role. His days were gone, the awareness of which might give a fatal swoop to his ambition and sense of superiority. He must have found it a hard time, for he was so used to being somebody. Finally, in a pretended tone of a good loser, he declared that he was kicked out of the game. He even twisted his face into a forced smile and folded his hands in a defending position. I still could not see through the depth of his eyes, but there should have been torrents foaming and rambling under the superficial serenity. Then he vented his anger towards that authority; the injustice inflicted on him--. However, our scant response dampened his eagerness of turning back to his fellows whom he previously had turned up his nose to. We said something to console him who he might take as crocodile tears and in which his oversensitive ears might distinguish a tinge of indifference and irony. He then retreated to silence, which disturbed the rest of us. We cancelled our usual talks after suppers and tried not to challenge him though he now seemed no challenge at all. Later, the suffocating atmosphere of disharmony drove some out of the dorm.

I went up to him, patting him on the shoulder, prefacing my consolation with a sigh. “I want home.” He snuffled, which made me stop at the sigh. I knew he was defeated, down and out. He locked himself out on the balcony for the whole night, with a bottle of white sprites, a little salted vegetable and two loaves of bread, with stars twinkling, silence prevailing and lights fading into the depth of darkness. He was left alone in a loser’s solitude; his silence might subside in him as fast as does the celebrated throb of his pulse: he should not have quarreled with that authority, given his furious feelings uncontrolled play---anyway, he was compelled by his disposition. Now he had the taste of indulging his passion. As the wine he was enjoying, it seemed, on swallowing, warm and tasty; its after flavor metallic and corroding, might give him a sensation of being poisoned. For god’s sake, give him some replacement to remedy this injury!

God did it. He was going to extremes, though we did not know when and how he became so. He indulged in gambling, and in due time went from an apprentice to a skilled gambler to master. Most of the time he could spare from gambling he devoted to the adornment of his person-it was something to see him peering at himself in the mirror, adjusting and readjusting his patience. He was frequently seen in video game rooms, bars, sometimes alone, sometimes in a noisy crowd, which he found agreeable company, and of which he became and immediate member. Of course, he was now much better informed of the world- whenever there was a fuss, he would be one of the first purveyors, and whatever was a fashion, he would be among its first practitioners. He liked anything but study, becoming a frequent absentee from class whose performance went from bad to worse- he could not help himself, we said that his home took him back.

Finally came the time he was caught on spot when stealing. We were dragged out of a dream by an uproar in the doorway, then fierce knocking at the door, and then there he was, escorted by cops, hands tied, jaw suspended, eyes beaten blue, cheeks swollen, wearing an expression of a hangdog. The cops searched his drawers and took him away in surrounding chaos. He was gone, leaving a legend on campus.



He said it: life is to live day by day, yet he had not the fortune to witness what dissipation we indulged in the remainder of our college life. Exams, even band eight meant nothing to the graduates because a job, whether decent or not, was at hand; then what the hell need we to strive for? If anything, we explored infinite pleasure in playing cards, chatting into the small hours. When an unfathomable chord was touched, we would sneak out to a bar, got small dishes and drink until we were like whisky bottles, only neck and belly, and no head. Time dragged on in the duplication of such cheap pleasures. Anyhow, we were bachelors, whether those who had made love to more than one innocent girl in SISU, yet still had the art to keep single, or those who whenever facing a girl, would flush and blush, murmur and mutter, yet still had the perseverance of hammering themselves in repeated torture of this kind, o r those who wanted desperately to cal the attention of the girls, yet even their vague eyesight meeting theirs would scare them away.

Our dorm talks revolved about girls; thereafter, the only family man in our dorm became the victim of our curiosity: he had to report to us the details of his affair. Seven Vs one, the force was so unbalanced. We would pick at him when we were not satisfied with his report, throwing him on his bed. Despite his incessant asking forgiveness, we would control his limbs, torture him by itching, kneading, rolling, and let him laugh between pain and fun. After we let him go, we would, one after another, throw our weight on him, leaving him to the point of gasping. When he got over it, we would have a concerted trademark of laughter, which once stunned our teacher, commenting, “it can not be laughter by humans, but whining from hell.”

Our neighbors, the students in lower grades, believed that we were a lost generation and we thought of them like wise. We sometimes made fools of them, saying, “we were what you are, and you will be what we are.” And we were greatly satisfied at their bewildered expression, cheering to each other for being philosophers.

Sometimes, he stole into our conversation. Out of an indescribable state of sensation, we would say that he made it- he won a notorious win and a notorious loss: he proposed well and god disposed him well since he at least had been the hero in a spotlit drama, strutting and trotting for a while. We were not so lucky. He then would be a preface, from which sprang our complaints about the injustice of the current system, about our vain ambition-as if we were the sages who were ready to shoulder whatever obligation to advance china, but it fell on the philistines. Then we would wind up, saying that we were the same as he; the only difference lay in degree.

In my memory, that was a bleak season despite those hustles and bustles. A couple of months before e our graduation, while the students, crowded in the cinema were applauding the presence of a singer on campus who made her reputation overnight, a boy committed suicide. Rumor said that he was not himself that night, running upstairs and down stairs, only with shorts on. Eventually he threw himself down from the banister on the fourth floor- the height might give him the grandeur of a martyr’s death if he made it in daytime, but he still made a delayed highlight. The first witness said he saw a mass thud falling on the ground. When he drew closer, he found it a man, bleeding, struggling, gasping, reach his hand to the witness, begging in a hoarse voice “H-E-L-P”, and then cringe back, dead. “Damn it, how can a person perish that way?” the witness cursed.

That, together with the death of a girl several days later, spiced the days and added material to our conversations. We said that he had a standing impact.

He was in jail, two more died, and we were to live in another way---we all graduated in our respective ways.
_________________
无话可说

[星子]

Did u write this? I only hope I can write some stories.
_________________

[[ANNA]]

Did u write this? I only hope I can write some stories.
_________________