Welcome back to Wayward Things. From this edition onwards, this newsletter will be shorter, more regular (every two weeks), and still as wayward as ever in its curiosity.
When I set up this publication, I settled on the name because life seems to me to be inherently wayward: things are contingent, unpredictable, and more complex and fascinating than we might first imagine. If there is a downside to this, it is that we will rarely manage to master anything much at all, because the world always keeps slipping from our grasp. But if there is an upside, it is that the world maintains the capacity to surprise us and present us with new possibilities.
One writer whom I’ve been obsessed with for the past few years is Liu Xie (劉勰), who flourished in China around the turn of the sixth century. Liu is chiefly famous for his treatise on the art of writing, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍).
I’m currently working on a writing manual for contemporary writers, based on Liu’s text. On one level, Liu’s book is a treasure trove of recondite literary and philosophical references for scholars to chew over. It has generated a whole field of study known, charmingly, as “dragonology” (lóngxué 龍學). But on another level, Liu’s book is also a remarkably fresh and creative examination of the art of writing, the foibles of writers, and the intimate connections between writing and life. And this is what interests me. Liu is often opinionated, sometimes funny, sometimes savage. He is a writer utterly intoxicated with the world’s vast profusion, and with the ability of writing to testify to this profusion.
While thinking about this newsletter, I’ve been reading Liu’s chapter on shénsī (神思), often translated as “imagination.” In this chapter, Liu talks about what he calls shén yǔ wù yóu (神與物遊), which translates as something like, “the mind and the things of the world roaming about together.”
This seems to me to get something right about how to go about thinking when the world is always too vast and too slippery to get hold of. Although I’m a philosopher, I’m a pretty unsystematic one. When the world is so abundantly profuse, systematic philosophy seems to me to be overrated. My hunch is that we’re never going to master the business of living, or make complete sense of it. But what we can do, following Liu’s model, is think alongside things, as we ramble about through the world. As Liu writes in chapter 26 of the Wenxin diaolong,
through their outward appearance, things provoke the creative imagination, and through pattern, the heart and mind respond.
物以貌求，心以理應
So every other week, I will take one of the things I’m currently thinking about, and go roaming about with it, taking a short walk to see what I can find. Some of these excursions may end up in interesting places. Others may be dead ends. But then, who says the point is getting somewhere?