Bei Dao Quotes

In the world I am Always a stranger I do not understand its language It does not understand my silence

freedom is nothing but the distance between the hunter and the hunted

the bouquet Between me and the world you are a bay, a sail the faithful ends of a rope you are a fountain, a wind, a shrill childhood cry. Between me and the world you are a picture frame, a window a field covered in wildflowers you are a breath, a bed, a night that keeps the stars company. Between me and the world, you are a calendar, a compass a ray of light that slips through the gloom you are a biographical sketch, a book mark a preface that comes at the end. between me and the world you are a gauze curtain, a mist a lamp shining in my dreams you are a bamboo flute, a song without words a closed eyelid carved in stone. Between me and the world you are a chasm, a pool an abyss plunging down you are a balustrade, a wall a shield’s eternal pattern.

Writing was a forbidden game, Bei Dao (the Chinese dissident poet) said, that could cost one’s life. The poetry they published amounted to a new language, since “for thirty years the Chinese language there had no personal voice at all.” The official line on Bei Dao’s poetry was that it was politically subversive because it expressed intimate thoughts, asserting the rights of the individual by his or her own private experience. And the more obscure Bei Dao’s poems became, the more subversive the authorities considered him. He said, 'on the one hand, poetry is useless. It can’t change the world materially. On the other hand it is a basic part of human existence. It came into the world when humans did. It’s what make human beings human.

you take the poem's last line and lock it center heart------it's your center of gravity

eternity, that patience of the earth simplifies our human sounds one arctic-thin cry from deep antiquity until now

In the famous Darley and Batson Good Samaritan study in the early 1970s, a large number of seminary students were subjected to a time constraint and told to walk past a person who was writhing in pain and needed help. The victim was actually a paid actor who had been strategically positioned to participate in the experiment. They found that students’ willingness to stop and help the victim strongly correlated to the perceived urgency of the time constraint—low hurry, 63 percent stopped to help; medium hurry, 45 percent stopped; and in the high-hurry scenario only 10 percent offered any form of assistance at all. Only an average of 40 percent of seminary students stopped to help.

Excellence cannot happen in the kind of environment that values time constraints above all else, and you certainly cannot harmonize anything within the Gong Dao Bei until arriving at that keen level of spiritual and emotional maturity where a deep appreciation of the ultimate opportunity is felt and understood.

Freedom is only the distance between the hunter and his prey. —Bei Dao

The landscape crossed out with a pen reappears here.