Should We Read?

Edited version of the Pub:

How seriously should we take books? Though many teenagers are reluctant to read nowadays, reading is still generally regarded as a way to cultivate our intelligence. Rather than manifesting our awareness of the dangers of books, defenders of reading assure us that reading must necessarily cultivate our intellectual and emotional demands and instead urge us to adopt a fetishistically reverent attitude to their literary merits. Prompted by this literary fervour, we are therefore obliged to surrender to the reading lists carefully formulated by school teachers so we may obtain a wider vision of the world to accomplish a range of intellectual endeavours.

For many devoted readers, the benefits of reading cannot be more obvious. In the face of financial assault, political disgrace, and romantic pessimism, our wretched souls are likely to assume a melancholy air and contemplate the inherent frustrating experience of life. Disconsolate, books invite us to abstract all our surroundings and take refuge in a more agreeable world, tempering our anxieties that are caused by the reality. The other benefit of reading, and a more crucial one, is that it makes allowance for our critical analysis, and thereby makes way for us to develop our intellectual faculties of what we feel, even when it means other writers help us to do so. Instead of taking whom we admire as oracle, we should consider these writers milestones of our own thoughts, through distilling their wisdom, remedy and refine the significant parts of ourselves.

But books often cause their readers a few problems. Not only we often mistakenly regard our favourite writers as being lucid on almost all topics, but it's also because they might silence us. If good writers might influence us in a negative way, it is because their writings contain bits and pieces that we don't yet know how to articulate. A survey of Shakespeare's works, through the insights into human nature that are beautifully suggested in the balanced phrases, may strike us with awe, but it's maddening in the way we are unable to command our minds with fluidity to articulate our pens across a blank sheet of paper to state precisely what we feel. The works of a fine prose stylist detonates a too great potential to rival against even the most insatiable desire to write.

Another problem is idolisation. When we encounter a beautifully written work, it is perhaps not the case that we might idolise the writer, but, rather, the objects the writer so skilfully describes. Upon reading Gombrich's "The Story of Art", though one may learn how to appreciate certain works of art more properly, behind its forceful description of works of art lies the implicit tendency to savour what Gombrich aligns with artistic merits, harbouring within us an appreciation of what is depicted in the pictures rather than the artistic quality of the pictures. We are forced to reconcile an intended artistic reverence with a neglect of what constitutes the essence of the works of art, hence liable to suffer the rigid inability to appreciate what is ignored by Gombrich.

To read too much is therefore to paralyse our intellectual temper with literary idolatry and deny us our right to individuality to voice out what we value. It forgoes a family of life-enhancing ideas which can only arise through the rigours of critical analysis and invites a sense of authoritarianism to which we consistently surrender. It discolours the flexibility and complexity of the human mind to which our imaginative vision is anchored. Moreover, reading is a response to anxiety and unhappiness. To encourage the habit of reading is to further acknowledge one is in a state of unhappiness, frustrated at our inability to translate and adapt ourselves to the realistic incarnation of what is desirable.

For those who think reading is necessarily a good thing, I should strongly argue for the opposite, that reading too much, or even reading itself, may actually close our minds to what is intelligent. Not only parents should stop encouraging their children to read, we should also acknowledge that a place that is devoid of passionate readers is the best place to live in, because most people scarcely have the need to read.

W

Hotel Management and Architecture

Keen to take a break from routine, we often hope to get away from the habitual and summon the desirable versions of ourselves in order to take on a different perspective to look at the world. But change is not always easy. One possible reason is that we tend to think of our homes as anchors of identities. If homes are indicators of who we are, it is perhaps because they are often the material articulation of what we think a good life is. Not only they help lay down a framework of our identities, but they also subtly suggest the values we hold dear to.

However, problems arise because our homes are often reluctant to change. Our furniture and decor implicitly suggest that the values we are liable to adopt are more praiseworthy than the ones that are left unexplored. But there are times when we doubt whether we are heading to the wrong direction and are no longer sure who we really are. Hence, in order to get away from our moral confusions and the chatter of societies, a change is needed. The solution is travel.

Only until we encounter a temple in Kyoto, an exotic palm tree, a landscape of Dutch modernist houses, we may venture to revise our previous assumptions of life and initiate a breakthrough. Unfortunately, aside from cities like Las Vegas, books and tour guides written on the subject tend to seduce us to generate a receptivity to famous tourist sites instead of the places all tourists and travelers are necessarily clung to, namely, hotels.

Travel guides often avoid in-depth descriptions of hotels except matters regarding prices, the kinds of restaurants, and the kinds of entertainments as if hotels are merely a means to shelters. To exaggerate the facilities in hotels is to disregard the settings and the layout of them, that is, the architecture itself and how it may be beneficial to the people. But tourism is a field that is constantly evolving. It often investigates what may attract tourists and how it may improve the general quality of travel. If tourism is a field that constantly demands new ideas, why can't we direct our focus on hotels as ideal tour sites rather than cliche landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and the Tokugawa Castle? Can we not spend more time in hotels that we favour instead of forcing ourselves to be moved to tears by what all tourists are supposed to like?

Hotels, like airports, may be thought to be centres of cultural diversity and globalisation where people from all over the world, through the struggle of choices of hotels that are available, finally settle on a particular one to be their temporary homes. It is interesting to witness how many people with different cultural backgrounds envisage an identical vision of happiness, offering conclusive evidence of a global village. Yet hotels are far from being merely shelters whose rooms offer comfortable beds for us to stretch our legs, wrap ourselves up with blankets, and extinguish consciousness for several hours. They operate like our homes, suggesting a certain visions of what we might want to become.

If buildings are meant to be functional, yet translations of our psychological make-up, we may be tempted to look at the Villa Savoye at the summit of Poissy constructed by the renowned French architect Le Corbusier. Though Le Corbusier once remarked that the sole function of a house was shelter against severe weather and to accommodate us with a range of activities such as cooking that were essential to our survival, it seemed rather hard not to detain our attention when the flat roof sprang a leak in a bedroom where the boy of the Savoye family suffered from a chest infection because of the amount of water the roof had invited during rainy days. However functional Le Corbusier insisted the house was, what motivated him to construct the house was aesthetic interest rather than practical concerns. Behind this principally technological house lies the implicit attempt to support a way of life that appealed to the modernists: science, technology, efficiency, democracy etc. Le Corbusier wished the house to contribute to a certain mood, a transubstantiation of what we value into a material medium. How ironic the fact that he subtly designed a house out of beauty that was theoretically justified on technological terms rendered it uninhabitable.

For architectural gravity, many great religions are its practitioners. Over the course of human history, we have constructed temples, churches, and cathedrals to enforce our moral aspirations within ourselves. In the face of financial necessity, political disgrace, and romantic pessimism, the heaviness concentrated upon our mortal souls is perhaps too great to be fortified within our material casings. Hence we are tempted to inscribe certain values on works of architecture to act as sobering reminders of what we hold dear to. Gazing at the coloured windows that depict the story of Christ and frescos that illustrate the majesty of God at once harbours within us a feeling of solemn awe and force us to contemplate ideas that might have been inconceivable in the commercial world. Surrounded by the Gothic grandeur, ideas that might seem laughable in the secular world would begin to make sense and assume an air of sanity, for works of architecture beautifully administer the correct dosage of our missing virtues we wish to savour in our hearts.

Therefore, if we wish to change ourselves through travel, can we not regard hotels the kinds of places that help enforce the aspirations we wish to secure? If they are our temporary anchors of our undiscoverable identities, can we not direct our energy towards where we want to stay at instead of dedicating at full force our geographical interests to the place where we set foot on? The field of hotel management has long rested the improvements of hotels on the regulation of prices, the sorts of facilities, and customer service. Yet the notion of architecture largely leaves unnoticed, if noticed, neglected.

If the field of hotel management is to make some serious progress, perhaps its practitioners may need to invite architects to reconcile beauty with what is functional. There comes the time where we need to find a balance between hotels and the destination that can supposedly change us. The value of a beautiful work of architecture lies in its ability to grant us permanent access to certain emotional textures that allows us to arrest the transient moments, and solidify them, the kind of things that a beach or an exotic plant might not profess to do. It allows us to experience certain visions of a good life which we can regularly attend to.

What makes hotels significant is that they are the only places that retain the possibility to strike us with familiarity when we travel abroad. Through a setting that differs greatly from our homes, our continued exposure to it, rather than the places we tend to only visit once upon travel, suggests that the qualities contained within the hotel may assume a greater hold on us. It makes allowance for the possibility to bind our emotions to the fabric of our temporary homes, project them up to the sky, and reflect them back onto the ones that are located thousand miles away.

We shouldn't be repelled by Wittgenstein's claim that doing philosophy is nothing compared to being a good architect. A beautifully constructed hotel not only inspires examination of one's own self, but also reflects the values of the place where it is situated. It seeks to compress all the memorial qualities of a place and translate them into a material language we are all inclined to understand- so to hope to reform our deeply flawed characters. Upon travel, perhaps nothing can be more tiresome than selecting a hotel to fathom our souls.

W

Why Self-Help Books Should Be Useful

A piece for the Pub:

There is no more ridiculed genre than the self-help book. Yet far too many turn to this genre to escape from bureaucracy and the chatter of societies. If self-help book seems to offer consolations of our miserable lives, it is perhaps because it wishes to pin our hopes firmly on the sentiment of fierce optimism. Rather than telling us how the world actually operates, it tends to depict the world as totally just and equal, rendering it completely meritocratic.

Whatever shortcomings self-help books may have, though novels and literature may offer a better solution to human condition, to undermine the value of self-help book is to downplay its traditional role in literary history in contribution to our wellbeing. Much of the history of this genre spent its gloriest history analysing aspects of human psychology and aiming to enrich our lives through practical advice on the art of living such as friendship, romantic love, and diet instead of how we might boost up our self-esteem . The prestige of self-help books owed its success to its practitioners who were largely made up of philosophers and essayists, whose writings seduce us to bear a philosophical mind to even the most trivial details of our everyday life, through sensitising our awareness of the habitual, attuning our minds to pick up certain details that we are previously ignorant of.

Many of these writers were Stoic thinkers. Philosophers ranging from Epicurus and Seneca, Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, wrote a great deal of self-help books almost on every topic, offering practical advice to help us deal with death, the rejections of our lovers, and how to be happy without being rich. Instead of telling us how we might save up our money and invest in stock market, their advice went to the very core of human nature, urging us to perfect the art of going with the flow even when what was before us was as hard to swallow as, to use Arthur Schopenhauer's phrase, a toad.

This is precisely the bent of thinking that underlay the prominence of traditional self-help books. Not only they ventured to portray the world as it is, but also convinced us to be lightened by life's absurdities, adapting to the change rather than resisting it. But this is no optimism. Rather, it suggests pessimism, refuting the grave assumption that we will be cheered up when we are told all is well, and instead drawing us to the thought that we should never expect anything to go well, so we may restore the tranquility of our mind.

If the tradition of self-help books is deliberately divorced from philosophy, then perhaps philosophers are largely to blame, for they are no longer concerned with how to live happily, but, rather, how to get facts and concepts right. The greatest enemy of this genre may be thought as analytical philosophy, whose main objectives are clarification of concepts and logical consistency which seem almost totally irrelevant to our everyday experience however much we need logic to distinguish good arguments from the bad ones. Modern philosophy is entirely lacking its traditional vigour to improve our wellbeing.

Unfortunately, our steering away from analytical philosophy is not enough. The crucial danger of modern philosophy is that many philosophers suffer from the rigid inability to write beautifully. If we survey the history of philosophy, most of the philosophers, aside from the ancients, are terrible writers. Their inability lies not in being unable to articulate their ideas clearly, but, rather, in taking on a wrong perspective of how the human mind operates. The fact is the human mind needs to be seduced and entertained. Instead of employing the art of writing in merely a logical, coherent manner, they should pay more attention to plotting, a characteristic to which novels and literature are anchored.

Therefore, not only philosophy should resume its importance in self-help books, philosophers should also relearn to recast our moral confusions and griefs and collapse an old wisdom into beautiful, communal sentences in order to appeal to the lay audience. I wish to imagine one day where philosophers write much less for philosophy journals and fill their own writings without the slightest trace of jargons, where the self-help sections in any franchise bookshops whose bookshelves will be filled with volumes of Stoic writings, the entire collection of Alain de Botton's popular philosophy, and Bertrand Russell's essays instead of books with lurid covers and images of optimistic-looking faces that tend to falsely do away our anxieties and worries. Because, as the British philosopher John Stuart Mill put it so well, "ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so."

W

On Novels and Literature

A piece for the Pub:

If we walk into any franchise American book shops nowadays, most bestsellers may be classified into one broad category: self-help. Self-help books tend to bear optimistic titles that supposedly help us to cope with our existence, hovering between "How To Boost Up Your Self-Esteem" and "How To Awaken The Giant Within Yourself".

But it wasn't always like this. Much of our literary history has rested its glory on the genre of novels and literature. Classics ranging from Shakespeare's and Oscar Wilde's to Harry Potter and Twilight, it seems rather hard for us to neglect their importance to our wellbeing. But why would novels and literature start to lack their appeal? Do self-help and finance books help us make some serious improvement of the quality of life so we may legitimately ignore the lessons novels and literature have to offer?

If self-help and finance books are the guidance of how to live, it is perhaps because these genres supposedly aim to seduce us to get something practical out of them and help us improve our lives in a certain way. But as we contemplate pages of practical advice in our beds, sadness might have been returned, for not only they are filled with illusions of what life actually is, they also go on to paralyse our imagination of possible happiness. The drawback of self-help books lies in their attempt to explicitly temper our worries and anxieties with a sense of primordial optimism, while subjugating our accurate views on life, they tend to falsely describe the world as one full of opportunities rather than one that is inherently depressing.

If we are to find a way to console ourselves in the midst of economic hardships and political disgrace, yet self-help books are unable to recast an old truth or wisdom into passable communal sentences, then perhaps we may need to turn to novels and literature in order to remind ourselves of how we should live. One valuable lesson from novels and literature is that they tend to mirror our experience. Rather than making false additions to an already muddied picture of life, their stories are generally founded on our everyday experience, harbouring in us a sense of belonging. But what's so special about mirroring our experience?

If mirroring our experience is essential to helping us to cope with our existence, it is because it sensitises our awareness of what we all have experience with. It allows us to pay attention to the minutest details what we may easily neglect. Upon reading a romantic novel, while we all may have experience falling in love, it transforms itself into a prism and forces us to adapt its content to our experience, allowing us to take on a different perspective that we may be previously ignorant of. It stretches to an ability to describe our emotions and our psychological make-up far better that we do. It guides our mind to pick up certain signals that initially bypasses our consciousness, and from that, cultivating our emotional sensibility and generating an entirely new experience of what we are familiar with.

What's more is that it allows us to understand experience that is not our own. While most of us tend to work in offices as ordinary white collars, seldom we are detectives, murderers, spies, and the like. Novels and literature present before us professions we are unlikely to have experience with and tell us what the world is like from their perspectives. Hence the business of novelists is also to enlarge our sympathy. They engage us into an experience we are unfamiliar with and ward off our bias and prejudice that might have been arisen through our conceptions of these professions as outsiders. This is also precisely one of the most admirable values of democracy. The virtue of tolerance lies not in respecting the differences in ideas and opinions, but, rather, in trying to understand them, through discussions and debates. How easy novels and literature may prompt us to understand others.

The limits of the modern form of self-help and finance books stem from an incompetence to portray our lives accurately and offer relevant insights to improve our wellbeing. In our current moral confusions, novels and literature are crying out to resume their importance.

W

Can Feminists Fall in Love?

A slightly edited version from the Pub:

Wearing bikinis and lingeries may be considered the triumph of feminism. As we glance through the gossip magazines and sexually appealing images in calendars, we should bear in mind that nudity offers substantial female confidence. Instead of regarding their bodies as areas of potential shame, women are finally able to display their physical candour and identities through various styles of bikinis and lingerie, mitigating the tension of the equality between men and women. However equal they may get, feminism is in violation of the fundamental law of seduction, forcing us to give away a vital ingredient of love, namely, romance.

Seduction is an art that is never easy to master. The irony is that it seems easiest to seduce those we are least attracted to instead of the ones we actually like, because the ones we desire elicit in us a sense of inferiority as compared to the perfections we have located in our beloved. What makes seduction difficult is that it lies not in revealing our character as a whole, far from offering a sense of intimacy, it is founded on the display of our finest qualities, because the desirable versions of ourselves are often not ours to summon at will. But how may we carefully administer the correct dosage of our admirable virtues? How can we ever be sure this or that virtue may appeal to our beloved?

The usual solution, and often an effective one, is to be modest. But as long as modesty stems from our crippling sense of inferiority, we often appear to be extremely reserved, and on some occasion, have the need to lie. Hence the experience of seduction is inevitably bound up with that of an actor. It’s because we need to take on a self that is not entirely our own in order to seduce the angelic face we happen to be dining with. All of a sudden, we are stripped of a sense of individuality and reminded of the anthropological wisdom that we are all social animals, that our existence is critically dependent on the others.

But what does it mean to be modest? One common answer often comes from fashion. But it is often an ambiguous one. The traditional view of how to modestly dress aims to unearth the desirable parts of skin textures yet cover some of the most intimate parts to assure masculine blindness until one is, perhaps, granted intimate access to one of the most sensitive and softest tissues among our sensory organs. To be modest is therefore to temper our modern need to be nude. The evolution of fashion, however, suggests there is no proper distinction between nudity and modesty today. What is modest in women's fashion constantly involves with the active participation of a desirable form of nudity. Wearing bikinis and lingerie get on fashion runways as much as those who conform to the traditional dressing code.

Of course, modesty suggests far more than that. Aside from fashion, we may also need to be modest in our manners and behaviours. As for a man, besides a constant need to display his wit and humour, he may need to suppress his usual tendency to swear and engage into conversations regarding pornography and a rather superficial appreciation of feminine physical beauty, and instead be drawn to offer fine knowledge of various types of wine and the like. Whilst for a woman, she may refrain from being far too outspoken, though occasionally may be permitted to ventilate bits and pieces of her intelligence, and suggesting a belief in the openness in sex. How could one be oblivious to the fact that men are highly deluded by the concept of virginity.

The current trend of acclaiming feminine identity through nudity therefore risks harbouring an opposite sentiment that does away the romantic conception of love and inspiring an unfair neglect of the merits of being reserved and modest. Not only it ignores the vital role seduction has to play before embarking on a romantic journey, it also renders love impossible, because many are seduced just because of the absurdly reserved behaviours mentioned. Modesty is the mother of love.

Perhaps it’s time to readjust the values advocated by feminism. The limits of feminism make a case for the impossibility of romantic love and seek to destroy some of the best qualities possessed solely by women. One of the best parts of civilisation lies not in promoting the equality of both sexes, but instead in how to express their inequality in a desirable, democratic way.

W

On Ancestors

In ancient China, it was not uncommon to witness signs of ancestor worship. If it was important in ancient China, it was perhaps because it was believed that people might be able to foster luck by tracing back their ancestral roots. Unfortunately, this tradition can hardly sustain in the modern secular world. It's not just because people no longer entertain the superstition of the blessing of their ancestors, but it's also because all sorts of new technology conspires to kill their ability to be alone and unstimulated, thus lacking the essential patience to study the tablets inscribed with the names of their ancestors.

But, of course, ancestor worship has deeper implications than just mere psychological value. In the west, people, unlike the Chinese, traditionally tend to lack the rigours to embark on the journey of extensive research into the origin of their families and trace them through successions of generations. They are instead drawn to an ancestral memory that is rather myopic, a curiosity that is quenched when they touch on the generation of their grandparents. The remaining work is left for the historians.

Though the people from the west generally exhibit a lack of interest in the origins of their own families, their love of ancestors is beautifully expressed in the modern form of biography. If we pay close attention to any biography, we can hardly pass their first page without a symmetrically constructed family tree. If family tree is essential to understanding the life of a great man, it is because it's interesting to follow a series of births and alliances which lead us to a chosen creature. The study of family tree not only suggests that greatness and genius may be passed on through genetic and cultural heritage of one's family, but it is also studied in the interest of ventilating a fantasy of how the ancestral experience of the recorded subject may mirror our own, so we may escape our financial assaults and the chatter of societies and aspire to greatness.

Whatever motives we may be inspired by studying the Chinese tablets or reading biographies, they wish to harbour within ourselves a distinctive sense of belonging and continuity. Just as our societies are formed by our past to establish their own identities, our need to understand the genesis of our own families is essential to knowing who we are. Biographies and the Chinese tablets offer a vision of a logical, complexly related world, that every generation of our family members must be traced and recorded in order to wage a war against amnesia, thus acquiring a sense of the self. It's because we will be nothing if we don't know who we are. Only through a sense of belonging and continuity, we may fortify our own identities within our souls.

But the majority are bombarded with the idea that not everyone is worthy of a biography. But to record the bits and pieces of ourselves is to foster a memory for our descendants to which their sense of the self is anchored. The creation of our own biographies helps unfold certain versions of themselves which are not theirs to summon at will, which cannot be arrested by mere experience. It is a sobering reminder that we will one day also become ancestors. So what must we do? Create a biography in either literary or visual form and assure a proper environment for our descendants so they may grow out of it without being lost.

W

On Memory

My piece for the Pub:

It's always tempting to lay your eyes on Central in the morning. A trip to the Starbucks coffee may offer us the best scenario for sight-seeing. In any morning on the weekdays, we may be in solemn awe of the landscape of Central being carpeted by a flock of black suits, rushing into Starbucks Coffee so they may rejuvenate themselves for a long day of work. The endorsement of Central values cannot be more obvious. The adoption of the American middle class lifestyle hints at a refusal of local values, which hardly warrants a restaurant of local flavour anything beyond ordinary pedestrian appraisal.

If drinking Starbucks Coffee is a vital ingredient for Central values, it is perhaps because a paper or plastic cup that carries a familiar green logo suggests a vision of more international tone. Rather than straying into a local restaurant for a ham and egg sandwich along with a cup of coffee blended in a style of local flavour, a cup of Starbucks may actually align us with an upper level in the pyramid of social hierarchy. Small wonder why Hong Kong is an international city.

However much Starbucks coffee we may drink, what is interesting is the fact that our desire for a cup of Starbucks stems not from our tendency to cherish work values, but, rather, from our romantic fantasy to centre our values rooted in a traditional American middle class routine. Behind the Starbucks drinking ritual hardly suggests our effort to reconcile the kind of happiness typical of the bourgeois outlook with financial necessity, rendering the surface more superficial than it seems. A sip of Starbucks in the morning may offer solutions for our fallible souls, for it carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues that are only deemed discoverable in the West.

This is, perhaps, precisely the reason why such scenario provokes a feeling of distance. But everywhere is like this in Hong Kong nowadays. While many may acknowledge the notion of historical value, but hardly there is anyone who offers sympathy for sentimental value. We may learn how our society and identity are formed by the past and traditions in order to acquire a sense of belonging and community. Our government may venture to do away the Tsim Sha Tsui Bus Stop and deprecate anything of sentimental value, yet too seldom they realise the merits of most buildings in Hong Kong lie not in their historical value, but, rather, sentimental value. Having breakfast at a restaurant of local flavour may not summon back a range of old yet valuable traditions, but the fact that being sat there might invite us to attend to a collection of life-enhancing thoughts in order to acquire a sense of the self.

What originally furnishes our sense of belonging and community is not merely architectural styles that offer aesthetic relief which reminds us of the past, it is also the resemblance of style and taste that triggers our bondage to what we may call a Proustian moment. Promoting ourselves to remember something often leads to an undesirable result. It often requires the charity of a friend's patience for us to utter the bits and pieces that seem to stretch too far to recall at all. True memory is different. It can only be experienced only accidentally and occasionally. Instead of being forced on us by another intrusive question of a friend, our memories might have only been returned to us only by an incidental encounter of a similarly constructed fried rice six years later in a restaurant.

The key to harbour our sense of belonging is whether that particular restaurant or this particular street can grant us access to certain emotional textures that only memory can attend us to. The problem of Hong Kong is that the landscape and what constitutes its soul fluctuate too much. Only through memory, our origin of birth may not be muddied up to a point where soul-searching is impossible.

Both physical and metal landscape of Hong Kong fails to recover a distinctive sense of community, belonging, and continuity. It deprives us of an essential medium to express our need for communication and commemoration, an attachment which can only be registered through memory, which only our will can transubstantiate through a material medium. Not until too long, we may no longer be able to tell others who we actually are nor we can remind ourselves of it.

W

The Herd Instinct Revisited

Here's my piece for the Pub:


The criticisms of the herd instinct might appear so common that they start to sound rather cliche nowadays. Though we are often reminded how it may strip us of our true identities, we still tend to be reluctant to detach ourselves from the bondage to the masses and establish our "i-confirmation". If the mass values are cordoned off questions, it is because they are deemed too implausible to be the targets of scrutiny. To start doubting the commonly accepted beliefs is to risk overthrowing the indisputable fact that great minds are scarce, that we are unlikely to be the pioneers of previously unknown truths.

Perhaps our tendency to follow the flock lies in the anthropological fact that we are all social animals. Rather than exaggerating the gravity of free will, our existence is actually critically dependent upon the existence of others. We can only be intelligent if others possess the same level of reasoning abilities. We can only be humorous if others are funny enough to get our humours. Small wonder why Aristotle remarked that friendship is essential to wellbeing.

However, humans are no machines. How seldom we may prefer to be obedient drones rather than creative originals. But how then might we solve the conflicts between the herd instinct and individuality? How might we discover our own identities if we are continuously forced to burden ourselves with the heaviness of inhabiting the same mentality? Is it impossible to reconcile mass values with our unique selves?

Mass values, at one level, might be easily regarded as deluded versions of truth, yet at another level they reveal something more than meets the eye. Mass values may be considered in the same light as fashion or wearing make-up. The quest to search for a decent pair of high heel shoes or a certain kind of mascara from Bobbi Brown provokes our philosophical sentiment to understand who we are. If we have a desire to understand ourselves, it is perhaps because identity is an inherently complicated, obscure notion, that one can bear various identities in different stages of life. Why do we have different identities? It's because we constantly succumb to new experience and are forced to harbour new visions about ourselves. Confused, we are therefore liable to adopt the suggestions forcefully made in the clothes and cosmetic section of a magazine to fit in a socially recognisable form. Similarly, the herd instinct works in the same mechanism. Unsure who we are, we need to surrender to the masses and begin our process of soul-searching.

Though I might have been charitable to the herd instinct, we should not deduce from my previous line of argument that the accusation against the flock is largely undeserved. To acknowledge the merits of the masses is not to legitimately consign them to respectability. Whatever sympathy we may have for the masses, it seems far from being inaccurate to generalise the herd between two acerbic notions commonly associated with them, namely, stupidity and ignorance. If stupidity and ignorance are the hallmark of social eminence, how might we tender the mass values as something valuable to justify the lifelong search for our souls?

The solution perhaps lies not in struggling to break free from the herd, but rather, in educating the masses. Much of the criticism has been focused on the individual self, but hardly there's any criticism focusing on the masses as a whole. What is valuable in educating the masses is that there are values perhaps the entire human race should hold dear to: democracy, science, emotional sensibilities etc. However democratic we may get, even in the most democratic society, there are never enough democratic participations, most notably, voting. To refuse to vote is to refuse to participate in the promotion of common wellbeing. Who could disagree freedom is desirable? Who could disagree science is the most reliable agent to civilisation? Perhaps only the exceptional few seem to suggest the otherwise.

The herd instinct might not muddy our identities as it tends to suggest. But the major criticisms against the flock push us into a baneful direction where we might hardly progress. What's important is the education of the masses instead of the other way round. How many years before the mass values might actually become praiseworthy?

W

On Love At First Sight

A slightly edition version from the Pub:


Whatever consumerist ethics might be vigorously practised by modern women, they seem far from being able to escape from the customary female logic- that we should never fall for logical factors such as money and physical appearance. The whole language of love has been corrupted by the sound assumption that our falling in love is based upon a mixture of ignorance and desire, rendering us liable to make false additions to an already muddied notion of self. If we should never fall for first glance, it is perhaps because the reality is always in the habit of disappointing us. A partner with an angelic face who supposedly possesses the ability to read Oscar Wilde's works may end up pinning her interests firmly on an issue of Cosmopolitan and a Hermes handbag.

Hence, in the mature account of love, before we are granted legitimately the right to fall in love, we are apt to investigate in depth about what opinions our partners may hold regarding science, politics, morality, and even daily habits. Instead of strictly following the traditional concept of how two sexes might align together, which is that of money and social status, we should look for in our partners logically irreducible elements: intelligence, emotional sensitivity, talents in the arts and crafts etc. In short, the cliché concept of "inner beauty". How easy a natural archaic impulse might be transformed into an artificially designed empirical notion.

If maturity indicates the quality of truth, then we might be forcefully led to abandon the inherently presumed distinctive differences between men and women, for men are liable to surrender to a superficial romantic logic easily triggered by the invitations of the appreciation body forms, make-up, fashion, and facial symmetry. We are forced to re-evaluate the politically incorrect gender stereotypes: in the mature account of love, women paradoxically analyse their romantic experience according to reason, while men submit their thinking to intuition, emotions, and impulsive desire. Why is it paradoxical? It's because when dealing with other issues in life, these two sexes tend to be consigned to exactly opposite categories. The feminists might have been in the right.

However, our instinctive curiosity to understand who our partners are poses a threatening problem. If the mature account of love is threatening, it is because understanding too much destroys romantic fantasy. Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love are those whom we know nothing. Our attraction for our beloved ones stems not from our constant intimacy with them, but rather, our lack of understanding of them. People who bear angelic faces tend to be able to carefully administer doses of illusion and reality, that faces happen to be aesthetically constructed in Golden ratio should be able to collect evidence which indicates signs of intelligence, femininity, and innocence around the eyes, noses, and mouths, an utopian image that could only be destroyed when they pick their noses aggressively without a handkerchief and display an excessive interest in the prices of high heel shoes. How seldom we acknowledge the inherent normality in our loved ones; how easy we might slide into a romantic pathology when love reveals its insanity.

Moreover, the modern world, with the help of technology, is changing with an incalculable speed. Our lives are filled with various experiences which are deemed too implausible to be identical with others. Is it sane to think what constitutes our partners' souls will remain the same? Is it sensible to secure our love of regularity for those who operate within the same mortal coil? If our desires and opinions are susceptible to change as time varies, why, then, can't we expect the same from our partners? The same burden no longer inhabits the same soul. Most of us are in fact not aware of our blind submission to Platonic utopia where eternity is praiseworthy and change is despised.

Therefore, the art of securing a romantic conception of love lies in an understanding absenteeism- a conception that is only possible when we don't know who our romantic partners are, but rather, who we think they are. So should we fall in love at first sight? Yes, always fall for first glance. Love without its romantic elements ceases to be love. Apart from the exceptionally rare cases in the romantic history, most depressing endings of romantic affairs are likely to result from the ones rooted in friendship and the like. It's only the romantic experience that we are after.

W

How To Take Your Time Through Public Transport

Back in the days before capitalism has become a legitimate economic philosophy, many valued a person for who he was rather than what he had. Capitalism, however, reconfigures the evaluation process and lends the idea of success to physical possession rather than its spiritual equivalent. Owning a Mercedes is therefore an indication of the quality of life. How easy one's ethical integrity might be determined by one's physical properties.

Though taking public transport might have violated our social hierarchical identity, though it might suggest something contrary to the Protestant virtue of hard work, to favour private cars instead of public transport is to risk inspiring an unfair neglect of values that might have only been arisen from, say, taking buses and a misguided enthusiasm for values that are often assumed by owning a car. The former, a sense of silent immobility and novelty, and the latter, a sense of freedom and solitude.

If public transport is often regarded as inferior to a Porsche, it is perhaps because it is likely to inspire monotony, having to stay fixated on a same routine every single day. Riding on a bus also suggests that the notion of who we are is critically dependent on others, that our existence is of no value unless the passengers who sit next to us or behind us accord us with signs of respect. Moreover, having neighbours sitting next to us also hampers us to move our joints and limbs freely, thus bringing physical discomfort, that our decisions to articulate our bodies are actually determined by the external rather than the internal.

Driving alone, on the contrary, avoids rehearsing the same driving routine. It offers opportunities to escape from the everyday rituals, especially the traffic, and conspires to rejuvenate us with a sense of novelty. Driving also seems to restore the value of solitude. Rather than going along with the value that a densely populated city might tend to suggest, driving celebrates the virtue of being alone and acknowledges the prided status of individual, making allowance for meditation, and liberating us from the flock, for the herd mentality may unfairly consign us to disgrace and others to respectability.

However, to condemn taking public transport is to fail to place it in a proper context as to what it may offer in life. If public transport has to be given its due place in our monotonous lives, it is because it might prompt us to think far more easily than clinging ourselves to our computer desks in office or in our rooms. Though we tend to pass by the same sceneries in a bus, we are likely to be assisted by the flow of the landscape, which is susceptible to change, inspiring us with a sense of novelty rather than monotony. We are also forced to investigate human behaviours which we often easily ignore- the lady who is dying to get on a bus, the man who is rushing to the metro railway station, and the man who is exchanging business ideas on his mobile phone. The sense of novelty, therefore, lies in the diversity of human behaviours and the flexible exterior decor and the advertisements of shops, which help anchor new reflections to life.

Of all modes of transport, buses are perhaps the best aid to thought. They lack the monotony that planes and metro railway are likely to inspire, the unbearable quickness that a taxi might ferry us to the destination, and the slowness that a tram is insistent to offer. If riding on a bus nurtures our ability to think, it's not just because we are confronted with a scene of novelty, but it's also because we are reluctant to think properly when thinking is what we are supposed to do, just like we are forced to write a publishable essay on demand. Riding on a bus allows us to abstract all the headphones snares and the talking that surround us, through taking in the passing scenery, offers us a sense of silent immobility to observe the seemingly silent mobility of the external world. It retains a peace of mind in us which is essential to contemplation.

If we are inclined to forget the benefits of taking public transport, it might be because driving our own cars subjugates us with the illusion to recover a sense of freedom. Instead of leaving room for us for introspective reflections, driving tends to divert our attention to the roads, for the fear of car accidents or our absent-mindedness for the traffic lights, forcing us to focus on our self-preservation instinct rather than bringing us back into contact with ideas and emotions that are of importance to us. It can only foster a form of rather unwelcome solitude, namely, loneliness, which only wears us out with an excessive longing for love.

Hence our travelling to work correlates with our desire to travel. What is beneficial about travel is that it allows us to get away from the habitual and the tedium, and encourages us, through the unpredictable changes around us, to unearth the visions about ourselves that previously lay buried in our hearts. If public transport is able to inspire us through the moving sceneries, can we not conclude that our travelling to work or school follows a similar trajectory? If we travel because we need not only a break from our domestic setting, but also from ourselves, doesn't riding on a bus similarly allow us to reflect on our lives from a height we are unlikely to reach unless before and after work?

Public transport can also be a remedy for loneliness. It recovers a sense of community, that though we may be lonely, we are consoled by the fact that we are not alone in loneliness, that many are similarly lost in thoughts and emotions. It brings us back a tight city feel, as opposed to a feeling of soullessness, reminding us of the fact that a city should be dynamic and needlessly be condemned to silence. Humans are still at heart social animals whose existence is critically dependent on the external world.

Travel is not necessarily a luxury. Though we may not be able to afford a trip to Europe or Japan, we can certainly afford a few dollars to start our journey on a bus to appease our yearnings for change.

W

Parental "Love" and Friendship

Here is the piece I wrote for the Pub:

If Chinese folk wisdom assures us that we should listen to our parents, it is perhaps because life experience is the anchor of the wisdom of life. Friendship is undoubtedly very important in childhood. It not only allows children to harbour a sense of friendliness and mutual equality, but it also tends to display versions of ourselves which we adults who are driven by financial necessity long to side with but can't, rendering cynicism unfavourable. Out of all parents from around the world, the Chinese parents are perhaps the best role models in this aspect.

Back in childhood, our parents clearly understood the importance of friendship. Rather than letting us select our friends based solely on our subjective criterion of what is favourable, our friends were often subject to the rigours of rational examination of who they really were. This exquisite enquiry heavily involved with a spirit of philosophical research, an endeavour to acquire a thorough understanding of the genesis of our friends, and most of the time, even their families. Our parents forcefully reminded us of the darker side of human nature, that things in the reality tended not to operate as what we used to read in those fairy tales. Therefore, a range of historical questions (that might trace far back to the time of their forebears) were necessarily provoked before we could legitimately open our intimate selves up: "Where do you come from?", "What do your parents work?", "Where do you live?", "What are your hobbies and interests?" and the like. How easily our autobiographical longing might find its outlet for the most genuine expression.

This tradition has been passed on down to this day. Behind the love of parents lies the art of how to select friends properly, inviting modern children to form a new coil of thought to reflect on what an ideal friend should be like: material success rather than its spiritual equivalent. Whenever they hit on a difficult problem in friendship, they are likely to be assisted by the possibility of turning to their parents, who offer them advice after they investigate the matter into the depth of waters, until the children can unravel their confusions without pressure.

Hence status and wealth are the promise of a good character which must necessarily nurture an ideal friendship. The young have been taught to value a friend for what they possess rather than who they are. It induces them to marvel at the belief that status and wealth can actually clear out the rough edges that one's character originally clings to, that people who come from such background are perhaps the best aids to bring them back into contact with emotions and ideas that are of supreme importance to them.

Moreover, Chinese parents also invite the young to harbour a feeling of suspicion at heart after they meet new friends. It's not just because they are too young to acquire the ability to separate illusions from the reality, but it's also because the Chinese tend to be critically cynical of the inherently good nature of the human species. Whenever their children meet new friends, they are likely to generate assumptions that throw their children on the negative versions of human nature, forcing them to suspect the unusually superficial friendliness displayed by their newly acquired companions.

Having analysed the Chinese parental approach to friendship, can we not conclude that parental "love" has enormous impact on how the young might deal with the one of the most complex elements of life called "friendship", that it actually helps shape the character necessary for the path children have to embark on in this commercial world? The French essayist Michel de Montaigne once remarked that "each friend has to give himself so entirely that he has nothing left for others." Chinese children are deprived of the chance to live according to this maxim. Small wonder why many Chinese don't want to be Chinese.

W

The Lessons of Manila

Here is the piece I wrote for the Pub:

Thanks to Manila and its police force, we have come to the realisation that we are merely the play-things of luck and fate. Aside from the tragedy itself and the uselessness of the Manila police force, we are suddenly drawn back to investigate the tension between stability and chaos. The incident forcefully throws us on the presence, inviting us to question what it means to exist. It also enforces a moment of deeper contemplation and urges us to readjust our priorities in life. If lessons are offered through this incident, it might be the fact that it reminds us that we should never let the thought of death slip away too easily, even if happiness is what travel tends to suggest.

In this critical time, the survived victims and the affected families may seek help from psychologists. If they think psychologists have a power to console, it is perhaps because psychologists supposedly have clear-eyed investigation into the depth of different versions of human nature. However, besides psychology, there exists a discipline in the academia that can perhaps offer as much help as psychology, namely, philosophy. How might a philosopher console the victims of this incident? What can philosophy offer to fan their dim light of hopes?

Hence I wish to draw your attention to the Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca. At one level, what Seneca has to offer might run counter to what a psychologist might commonly suggest, but at another level, it might actually prove more consoling. Rather than feeding the suffered with primordial optimism, what he offers is often of the darkest sort: "You say: ‘I did not think it would happen.’ Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that it has already happened...?’ If what happened in Manila makes us sad, it is because we are most easily hurt by what is most unexpected. But Seneca tried to calm us by reminding us that disasters will always be part of our lives, however wise we are and however advanced our technology is. Therefore, we must bear in mind the wisdom of "we might possibly die in the next second" at all times. To refuse to acknowledge the inherent complexity of human affairs is to engage ourselves into a religion of comfortableness. Our actions are rarely determined by our free will. On the contrary, it largely depends on luck and chance. Our destiny is never in our hands. How easy the long-standing philosophical debate between free will and determinism is decided by the death of eight hostages.

If the incident makes us incredibly sad, it is perhaps because the human race never has quite the capacity to understand the value of pessimism, the inability to live our sadness fully. We often harbour in our hearts a religion of optimism that assures us the fact that history is always progressive, that humans must necessarily grow wiser as time moves on, that we must always invest our hopes in the future. We have been plugged into an ancestral memory of what is comfortable. Unfortunately, this incident suggests the otherwise. It illustrates the depressing fact that the reality is always disappointing. Happiness is never guaranteed, even during a trip in Manila.

The value of a pessimistic habit of mind lies not in making us cynical, but in a paradox that griefs actually cheer us up. It invites us to the thought that somehow we are not alone in sadness that everyone perhaps suffers from the same pessimistic equivalents like ours. Moreover, it alleviates our pain by reminding us there are things in this world that are profoundly sadder than this incident- the suffering of the Africans from poverty and hunger, the Rwanda Massacre, the women who are stoned to death in the Middle East. Pessimism forces us to dwell upon things that are even darker and gloomier, which in essence induces us to reflect on this relatively minor incident that things perhaps could have gone even worse.

But what deeply underlies pessimism is more arresting. It is because pain allows us to grow wiser. It helps enforce moments of contemplation, pushing us to acquire a better sense of reality and placing pain in a more proper context, just like only when we stump a nail on the ground, we may have the awareness of pain, thus becoming wise to the fact that human bodies are fragile. What is valuable about pessimism is that it puts us through a mental gymnastics which could not have been arisen without suffering. It strengthens our minds by producing a proper amount of cerebral activity, as opposed to the predominant trend of zero consumption of brain energy nowadays. It wards us off illusions and urges us to entertain vital thoughts that promote our intellectual adequacy and emotional sensitivity.

Therefore, we come together to acquire the capacity to be happily sad. There comes the time when we must put our darkness on the table and confront it, that we should embrace sadness and suffering to push ourselves towards a more correct direction of life. The lessons? The incident in Manila was undoubtedly a tragedy, but we should allow its dimension to be a part of life, as something to remind us of what life constitutes. It offers insights for our lives as to how to be properly and productively unhappy. Only through pain and suffering, we may learn to be the masters of life. May the victims rest in peace. But I hereby wish things would go badly for all of us from now on.

"To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities- I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not- that one endures." - Friedrich Nietzsche

W

On Wearing Make-Up

For most women, wearing make-up is a daily routine. However, in the consumerist society where everything has the potential to be a tool of profit-making, many women seem to suffer financial assault on the cosmetic sector. Whatever differences there are between different types of mascaras and eyeliners, from a male perspective, it leaves us in wonder how women may easily be seduced to spend a large sum of money on what is seemingly the same products. Are the satanic genius of advertisers largely to blame?

There is a long-standing prejudice against women who spend an excessive fortune on cosmetic products in modern society. If the insistence on wearing make-up should suffer analysis, it is perhaps because it hints at a lack of women's inner beauty- their reasoning abilities, their artistic merits, and their capacity of knowledge. The fact that many women need to wear make-up stems largely from a lack of confidence in themselves, thus in hope of convincing others to collect intellectual evidence around their faces, noses, and eyes. How easily secular mortals may fall for angelic faces who bear inappropriate souls.

However true this accusation is, is it proper to judge a female experience merely because of masculine blindness? Though many social critics tend to condemn this particular female experience for its shallowness, how might we arrive at a more just and accurate, or perhaps charitable, assessment of the feminine obsession with cosmetic products if we are kept ignorant of what a facial routine is? Only after we are prompted by a spirit of philosophical research of what precise aspect each cosmetic item functions for, we may understand why women would chisel a dent in their bank accounts to purchase ten of those seemingly identical bronzing powder at the cosmetic counters of Bobbi Brown and Shisheido.

If we have the patience to investigate the minutest details of a facial routine, we may then unearth hitherto unknown truths about feminine beauty. We realise that some women may favour gel liner rather than pencil liner simply because it's smoother and that a light base is mostly used in summer while a heavy base is usually exclusively used in winter because of the humidity and the dryness these two seasons hint at. The study of a facial routine not only allows us to understand why women take so long in the bathroom, it also suggests that what seems so identical from a masculine perspective may actually help transform one's outlook, through employing different styles by using colours of minutest difference, depending on one's aesthetic taste of mix and match.

But what does all this mean? What do we learn from the in-depth investigation of a facial routine? If there is something valuable about wearing make-up, it is because make-up can reflect what one's psychological make-up is. A love for dark colour lipsticks may suggest one's character is of melancholy temperament, depending on what one's analytical inclination may be. But make-up is like fashion, liable to submit itself to trends rather than generate styles. Therefore, spending an afternoon at cosmetic counters is a process of soul-searching. Unsure who they are, they are prone to adopt suggestions offered in women's magazines in order to adjust themselves to socially recognisable forms.

But what underlies the feminine obsession with cosmetic products is somewhat more arresting. On contemplation, what is generally considered inner beauty is most unlikely to go through the test of time. However intelligent women may get, they are left with no choice but to surrender to the greatest enemy of youth, namely, aging. Our reasoning abilities are subject to decay as we are getting older. What's more, is that we tend to grow conservative as we age. Folk wisdom assures us that the accumulation of life experience allows us to grow wiser, but the reality often suggests the exact opposite. Rather than changing our minds as new evidence appears, our reluctance to adopt new ideas and opinions indicates a sign of the confirmation of prejudice.

Of course, women are not spared of the same destiny. Hence, if they strip away what is likely to vanish, they are left with nothing but a pure consciousness, some vacuous beings who are critically dependent on what others might think of them. Their consciousness, however, cannot be seen, but their casings can. So what's best for them to do is to enhance their physical appearance. Little wonder why women are attracted to fashion and wearing make-up.

Cosmetic products invite us to redraw the boundary between shallowness and profundity. What seems profound on the surface may end up being shallow, and vice versa. The two-hour ritual in the morning is no easy task.

W

On Dinning At Home

An edited version from the Pub:


For those of us who have more than enough to eat, dinning out might be considered a culinary delight. However much we love eating, it seems we are reluctant to invest enough confidence in ourselves to lay down judgements concerning the quality of food. Rather than ranking a wide range of restaurants according to a subjective hierarchy of taste, we tend to sacrifice our free will and surrender to tyranny, namely, the authority of food critics.

If we can't trust our own tastes, it is perhaps because the judgement of food, like art, has been left to an elite group who supposedly possesses profound knowledge of food. However, our eating according to their ideals also suggests that we neglect our own preferences of what good food is and willingly to be deluded by the fact that what the food critics think are good must be of culinary delight. How easily our unaided minds might be seduced to surrender to the objective judgement of what are good and bad.

If we are easily tempted to like restaurants, it is perhaps because they are able to offer what home-made meals precisely lack- customer service, the grand displays of the dishes, the kinds of interior of decorations which inspire the feeling of awe, and perhaps a live band. Restaurants, therefore, harbour a sense of perfection, fooling us into thinking that utopia might be just within our grasp.

However, that's precisely the danger of going to restaurants because they are likely to enforce moments of distractions. Instead of salivating to respond to what the chefs offer, our moods of happiness are wedded to the table settings, the exquisite interior decorations, and what music the live bands offer. How easily the efforts of the chefs who collapse their delicate and complex feelings into a set dinner can be undermined by what anchors to their creativity in the first place.

This then brings to us the significance of dinning at home and our habit of dinning. If there is something intrinsically more valuable in dinning at home rather than dinning out, it is because what we eat often provides a far more accurate account of who we really are. Our love for, say, steak not merely hints at our willingness of vegetable self-sacrifice and unhealthy diets, it might also accede to the symbolic meaning of, perhaps, our inability to empathize or our distaste for natural environment, depending on what our analytical inclinations may be. If we consider food in a psychological light, we may then unearth the inevitable link between food and personality.

But what does that mean? What does it have to do with dinning at home? It's because only through our subjective evaluation of what good food is, we might know ourselves better. The process of eating is also a process of soul-searching. It provokes our philosophical sentiments as a means of self-understanding. If dinning at home has something to do with the analysis of the self, it is because home-made meals are endowed with self-love. We only cook meals based on our own criterion of what is good. The merits of home-made meals lie in a sense of belonging, not only to ourselves, but also to the reality, because it always runs contrary to utopianism (which restaurants are often assumed to suggest) and offers us a sense of imperfection. It drifts us away from delusion and urges us to focus on what is real.

What's more is that we like to dine with our loved ones. If restaurants tend to distract us like the internet, then it merely means we are unlikely to address what really matters in life, things that we often talk about in an intimate friendship such as "What is your dream?" or "What might love mean to you?". Dinning at home mitigates the probability of being distracted and recovers a sense of intimacy. It strengthens the bonding of all kinds of loving relationship.

Many kids now favour fast food. And equally, adults tend to celebrate their reunion in restaurants. Not only the value of supper has been largely neglected, what proper environment we should dine in has also been largely devalued. Only after we revive the value of home-made meals, dinners will never be the same again.

W

On Boredom

In the modern technological civilisation, most of us probably get bored every day. If we get bored easily, it is perhaps because we at heart wish to escape from the monotonous everyday rituals. Exhausted by working in a compressed environment of corporate waters and engaging in the same orgies of gossip, we may realise there is something that needs to be changed, though we hardly know what precisely that "something" is. We need a break to get away from the habitual, not just from the tedium of the curtains and dinning tables our homes hints at, but also a break to get away from ourselves.

Aside from the everyday rituals, our sense of boredom largely stems from the web technology. Not only it conspires to kill our ability to be patient and unstimulated, it has also become the major anchor of distractions. One might be easily considered extraordinary if he could focus on a conversation with his best friend on MSN for more than five minutes, let alone the possibility of an intimate friendship. Moreover, bombarded with images and Youtube videos, the web has risked summoning our long-forgotten archaic suspicion of words and restoring our deep admiration for cave paintings. It hampers our semantic instinct. It's a miracle if you are still reading.

If we are suffering from the epidemic of boredom, it is because we can no longer possibly appreciate the value of being bored. Rather than making rooms for us to indulge in daydreams, boredom throws us back on the reality, the notion of the here and now, urging us to realise what is it that we really want in life. If we walk in any franchise American bookshops, most of the best-selling books are easily categorised into the self-help genre, normally about how we boast up our low self-esteem or how to become the next Bill Gates and Steve Job. The danger of modern society precisely lies in our ability to be overly optimistic because we can no longer derive pleasure from the darkest moods. If we could never endure loneliness, we might never understand the value of friendship. Likewise, if we could not entertain periods of boredom, we might not be able to understand the value of excitement and stimulation.

It is, perhaps, why we are more productive in the mood of boredom instead of the state of being occupied. Boredom allows us to realise what remains vacuous in our lives, reminding us that perhaps a change is needed. It drifts us away from a succession of well-known tasks and enforces a contemplative habit of mind. In the age of the internet, boredom is much needed.

W

Love or Tolerance?

At the start of a romantic relationship, it is not uncommon to slide into what we may call romantic pathology- that our partners must be figures of perfection. Only after a period of time, along with the objective evaluation of our friends, we may be spared of all the romantic fantasies and forced to admit to the inherently normality of them. If we are consistently reading things into our partners which don't belong to them, it is perhaps because we often fall into the delusion that their physical beauty necessarily aligns with the quality of their souls- that they must be filled with delicate and divine thoughts. It is only in dialogue with loneliness we may justify the existence of love.

Whatever our fantasies may be, the reality is always in the habit of disappointing us. A partner with an angelic face who supposedly possesses the ability to read Oscar Wilde's works may end up pinning her interests firmly on an issue of Cosmopolitan. This opens up a range of interesting yet dangerous questions: Why would she prefer to listen to Britney Spears rather than Mozart? Why would she favour a PC rather than a Mac? Why would she admire a pair of Converse's instead of Jimmy Choo's?

If there is a danger regarding our conflicting tastes, it might be because most of the arguments we have largely stem from a subjective hierarchy of tastes rather than nationality, class, and the likes. Yet we often hear the saying "I love you for everything you are." However many pages of the romantic diary we have contemplated, all of us seem more than happy to cherish the conventional wisdom of "everyone makes mistakes". Hence we should tolerate whatever flaws deeply clung to our partners' characters because what elicits love in the first place is that we love them for who they are.

But again, reality cannot be more unpromising. It seems we are often too unfortunate to see such reasoning applied to a romantic relationship. Rather than exciting our admiration for the political virtue of liberalism, most of us secretly harbour an idea that our partners must behave according to our ideals. If only we pay more attention to the nature of love, can we not conclude romantic love bears the same coercive structure of dictatorships in our political history?

From a distance, politics seems unrelated to love. But on closer inspection, we may easily arrive at a more charitable assessment of the relationship between both of them. The nature of romantic love might be easily seen as a contrary pull away from one of the highly praised democratic values, namely, tolerance. Though we may openly agree on the notion of diversity of ideas and opinions, romantic love is by nature fascist, that our partners should appreciate or depreciate certain things based entirely on our preferences. The fact that their tastes differ from ours suggests that their aesthetic logic is somewhat superficial which is in need of much edifying. But should we not respect their tastes?

If we think romantic love is coercive, it is perhaps because we often misunderstand what tolerance truly is. British philosopher Karl Popper suggests that tolerance is not to leave each other alone, but rather, to desire to understand each other. Rather than taking pride on being ignorant of what we are tolerating, we should understand what we are tolerating by enforcing an open dialogue. Therefore, the value of tolerance lies not only in permitting diverse ideas and opinions, but in the democratic virtue that all opinions should ultimately decided by discussions and debates even when they conspire to offer unhappy endings.

Hence to argue is to tolerate our conflicting tastes. But however democratic we may be, a constant argument over what a perfect sofa should be like or how leggings should be worn will result in a romantic revolution, namely, the threat of breaking up. If our aesthetic opinions and habits can no longer relax with a sense of humour, it is because we are in danger of understanding each other too much, a realisation of the inherent incompatibility between us and our partners. Each party stands firmly on the ground of doing what's best for the other. Though the truth is often depressing, it seems perhaps a stable relationship can only be founded on the contract between absolute authority and absolute obedience.

If romantic love makes no allowance for the idea of tolerance, then perhaps we may legitimately conclude that there is no "true" love at all, for everyone is unique, especially in the aesthetic realm. Our romantic fantasy is merely a naive romanticism inspired by novels and films. Romantic love, often mistaken as the same thing as marriage, should only be considered as stops rather than lifelong journeys. It is only intervals between loneliness. After all, we all have to die alone.

W

Why Architecture Matters

An edited version from the Pub:

From a distance, one might be in awe of the modernist beauty offered by a metropolis. But from up above, a landscape full of skyscrapers, surprisingly, evokes a sense of architectural pessimism. Rather than presenting to us the aesthetic equivalent of what Le Corbusier once envisaged , an overwhelming number of skyscrapers invites us to the possibility of reconciling two values that seem to be inherently incompatible on one single landscape, depending on how one views it.

If our appreciation of architecture has been hampered, it is perhaps because it runs counter to the ideals of a financial city. To care about a field that achieves so little, yet consumes so many resources, is to risk harbouring in us an idea that artistic merits don't always necessarily align with economic reward. However, there is a long-standing argument in aesthetics that beauty implies moral goodness. Hence if we live in a beautiful work of architecture, we will eventually become better. Unfortunately, in reality, a beautiful work of architecture, whatever its moral messages are, doesn't always nurture such naive romanticism. How six million of Jews could have been spared of their lives if beauty could command Hitler to emulate its spirits of what an utopia might be like.

If architecture has failed to change us, it is because there is hardly an objective criterion for beauty. The beauty of a work of architecture is largely based on persuasion, instead of forcing us to adopt the values it suggests, it only offers suggestions, rather than laws, which we are not obliged to follow. But in the age that only makes room for certainty, that only gives birth to people whose thinking is critically dependent on traditions, customs, and taboos, it seems architecture lacks the authoritative status to order how we should live.

It is, perhaps, why the property developers, whose minds only bear the notion of profit, are carpeting the landscape with utilitarian style of buildings, office buildings and apartment buildings alike, whose every window is of the same size, whose every floor offers no improvisation, and whose the exterior displays a lack of the use of a variety of construction materials. Though we rarely wish to be blown away by novelty, their obsession of order provokes in us not a feeling of admiration, but rather, a feeling of condemnation, as a proper response to their tedium. How much I feel sorry for the moderns who always work in the compressed environment of corporate waters, and after a long day of work, come home to see this. How easily our wish to escape from the monotonous everyday rituals may be wiped out by their insensitive aesthetic logic.

If the power of architecture only lies in persuasion, it doesn't necessarily mean it lacks the power to change us. What is valuable about a work of architecture is precisely that it only offers suggestions, rather than exciting our admiration with indisputable evidence, it merely suggests a way of living that might differ from our own, about how we might live and what we might become. To learn to appreciate persuasion is to understand the art of entertaining doubt. Our reluctance to be sceptical largely stems from an exaggerated sense of what we can achieve and that the world must be composed of black and white, nothing more. We are most hurt by what is most unexpected because we have obsessively clung to the idea of absolute certainty. Our frame of mind is either endowed with undue optimism or undue pessimism which makes no allowance for the idea of probability, rendering inherently complex human behaviours so simple.

The most precious value of architecture therefore lies not in its functionality, but in allowing us to speculate what may on the surface seem so certain and promising. It equips us with a rather pleasant form of cynicism, the sort that wrests us out of delusion instead of destroying all our hopes in human nature. It won't pull us away from taking sides, yet leaves us to remain fresh open to new evidence.

Architecture tends to redraw our perspective on what the world might be. Far from being composed of black and white, architecture acknowledges the existence of a grey area. It blurs the distinction of complete belief and complete disbelief, forcing us to suspend them properly. It requires us to open ourselves up to the idea that our opinions are susceptible to change as our experience accumulates, even our ideals of happiness.

If we are to escape such intellectual naivety, we may have to arrive at a more charitable assessment of architecture. It is not necessarily an indication of self-indulgence and our social status. Many great religions understand the significance of architecture and use it to subordinate people to attend to certain beliefs that depart from the norm in light of persuasion. If architecture aligns with our personal ideals of what a good life should be, it might help plant the seeds for creative originals rather than obedient drones.

W