Jan & I were in Bart’s Books in Ojai (one of the best bookstores we’ve found since we’ve come home to Southern California. It has become a bit of a destination place for us, or, more a major willing to go way out of the way detour on a drive to Santa Barbara. The only problem I have with them is they don’t have a public bathroom. You might think about that, guys…) where I picked up a copy of Gao Xingjian’s novel Soul Mountain. Gao won the Nobel for literature in 2000.
Soul Mountain is a great jumble of a novel, sort of autobiographical about a man who following a false diagnosis of a cancer takes off on a journey for a fabled mountain. A fascinating meander through rural China with sufficient encounters with shamans, Daoists and Buddhists to keep me turning page after page even though I’m not the biggest fan of literature (generally give me a good mystery any day…)
Anyway, last night as I was reading it, a passage jumped out at me, saying, basically, you want a description of the self? Well, here you go.
And, well, here you go:
I don’t know if you have ever observed this strange thing, the self. Often the more you look the ore it doesn’t seem to be like it, and the more you look the more it isn’t it. It’s just like when one is lying on the grass and staring at a cloud – at first it’s like a camel, then like a woman, and when you look again it becomes an old man with a long beard, but this doesn’t last because clouds are transforming very instant.
Bao Xingjian, Soul Mountain (translated by Mabel Lee)
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