St. John the Divine. Photo credit: Elia Zhang
It was surprising to think back that, after completing CC, the most moving text to me was the chapter of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament—I thought, walking toward the Cathedral of St. John on Amsterdam avenue. I’ve always known about the cathedral. Although it was in construction, it was supremely beautiful. Yet it took me a long time to find an idle afternoon to visit after possibly the most exhausting semester that I have ever gone through. “What’ you zip code?” The doorman asked me. “10027,” I said, which was the zip code an international student would use residing here near campus. “Are you a neighbor?” he said and smiled, “so you’re free to come in.” Then he saw my blue t-shirt underneath my jacket and said “You’re a Columbia student? Show me your ID and—oh, you’re doubly free.” Being a Columbia student meant that many places and events in the city were open for free, and hence I felt warmly welcomed, and at the same time, privileged.
Stepping into the elegant and mysterious cathedral, I was attracted by the engravings at Poet’s Corner. I looked at the quotes from literature and names of those who had long time ago first implanted within me the expectation of becoming a writer. It was five years ago when I walked into another giant building like this, gazing at the richly ornamented archaic dome, as well as imageries painted on glass windows that I did not quite understand. I guess today I still do not understand. Last time I saw the names carved on the wall, the young and ambitious faces, and the piles of books in the corner specially reserved for a so-called crazy artistic group. I had read the large poster with a young French writer’s high words, and had been excited, almost convinced myself that I was going to become one of them. Now I walked into the hall and saw the embellished ceilings, the solemn walls, and the silent, eternal light, the swaying candlelights in invisible ripples of wind. And all I could hear was sighs, the heavy sounds, coming from the engravings, the sigh that was bound to be exhaled at the end of every finished or unfinished sentence. “What is done under the sun was grievous to me; for all is vanity and striving after wind…” the line from Ecclesiastes emerged in my mind.
The high words that my youthful self used to believe in started to sink in. I started feeling guilty about my chasing after one opportunity and another, the repetitive completion of one task after another, only being unable to feel content with what I already have, or having the strength to appreciate life as imperfect but beautiful in its imperfection. It felt shocking to look at the person that I have become, like it was said in the Ecclesiastes, that for this person, all their doing was chasing after wind.
I read the words from Hemingway carved on the stones: “All you have to do is to write one true sentence.” How hard it was—I gradually came to understand—for a writer to write one true sentence, as Hemingway said, and as people in confession were supposed to do. To know what is true and to mold this incommunicable knowledge into the channel of language, and to do so within a world that is permanently flooded with temptations and desires, is a task in which possibility is still debatable.
In Ecclesiastics it is said that there is a limitation to the amount of knowledge mankind can gather. Rather than being wise, it becomes wisdom’s opposition, foolishness, for one to seek knowledge in everything. I thought back on a history class where we read from Blaise Pascal that the dimension of truth cannot be fully grasped from one perspective, yet each individual was only capable of seeing things from one angle. The hypocrisy of some parts of the academic world lies in its claim to have known the truth, which is in fact never comprehensible to the limited mind of the mortal being. Yet this realization, which should be placed as the premise of understanding the nature of academic work, does not make research institutions valueless, for we should sever the impossibly high spiritual demands of scholars’ work from the social and economic contributions that it can bring to the present world. In a word, I tried to transform the word “meaningless” from Ecclesiastes into a new paradigm that views the world based on the standard of “value.”
In the modern world we begin to believe that God is something else, as Nietzche once postulated, that we possibly now find God at the center of the marketplace. Walking out of the Cathedral of St. John after the transformative experience, I could immediately feel that we were now entering a brand-new world picture, leaving behind the medieval worldview as we come in and out of commercial activities. Is the new God as Nietzche said the God that we ourselves should be? Or is the school of 19th and 20th-century philosophy as a whole emphasizing too much on the strength and importance of the individual, that after all, the self was both freed and imprisoned into a belief of its absolute determination upon the word “meaning”?
Dragging my lengthy meditation back to the pastry shop, I saw the faces of customers and waiters, and the colorful, freshly baked bread and cookies. It was after all still uncertain whether I have broken the promise that I once made for myself. Those high beliefs, instead of disappearing, became truer under the reflection of reality, because theories can only be tested by practice. And that is probably why we write and learn, using the limited channel of communication that we have, to try calling back the soul. And that is the cause of those whose names were engraved on Poet’s Corner, the kind of cause we can continue now — I thought, gazing at the street extending into the heart of Manhattan, and felt no longer as lost as I used to be.