Human Beings are meant to live a hundred years, this man counted to a thousand just to get home. The next one spends a half of his life as a helpless child or spent half in sleep. Of the time that remains, half is added to mechanisms with increased complexity. So, what remains are all the various instances a person is plagued by pain, sickness, sorrow, bitterness, deaths, losses, worry, fear, and return. In sum, six years is hardly a measure at all of time in which a person can reason without needing any chance intervals- a perception of saving.
What is man’s life for? What pleasure is there in it? Is it for beauty and riches? Is it for color? When at a time beauty and riches no longer answer the needs of the heart, and when a surfeit of colors become only a weariness to the eyes, there are only remedies of which cheat history of the usual bad outcome. Do we live for the sake of being now crowed into submission by the fear of the Law and its penalties? We waste our rational faculties in a mad scramble of emotions none of which is worthy to note. What could be called a relationship is really a hollow praise of an hour, scheming to contrive that somehow some remnant of reputation shall outlast our lives.
We safely move through the various motions, in olden times it was a narrow groove; we are preoccupied with the various instances of those formulas that work for great men. Are we brooding over our prejudices, pretending the joys of life are among us without even knowing we only use those parts which are apparently missing? Consider for a moment you have a taste of the hardy wine of freedom. Should your anxiety be relieved, nothing gnawing at you, no perception of a need; is this also the character of transparency? We are truly imprisoned as if we lay at the bottom of a dungeon, heaped with chains but trusted and full of advice.
The men of grace and context know that life comes without warning, and as suddenly goes. They denied none of their natural inclinations, and repressed none of their bodily desires. They never felt the spur of fame. They sauntered through life gathering its pleasures as the impulse moved them. They filled in the cross roads, but they cared nothing for fame. In death they all have the same qualities and they all “pull snow.”
Now spurred to frenzied action by the promise of a reward or fame, the question is: were you a Cemetery or were you a Celebrity? Thus the myriad things are equal at birth, and again become equal in death. All are equally wise, equally foolish, equally noble, equally base.
Today people live fewer years to get home, others are employed many, but they all die. The benevolent sage dies just as dead as the wicked fool. Alive they were [the sage-kings] Yao and shum; dead, they are just rotten bones. Alive they were [the cruel tyrants] Lieh and Chou; dead, they are just rotten bones. And rotten bones are all alike; who can distinguish them? Then let us make the most of these moments. Try to notice the improvements and find ways of measuring them. We have to be concerned with what those have said…. always.
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