Temple Of Heaven Beijing Quotes

I’m aware that there is a bigger, far more complicated world out there than I’d ever realized, and just like the students at Beijing University, I’ve glimpsed it only fleetingly, peripherally. I’ve sensed the vast expanse of my own ignorance now. I feel antsy and constricted and a deep, almost sexual yearning for velocity, for some sort of raw, transcendent experience that I cannot even begin to articulate.

Those lacquer boxes I love to hold - the ones with the deep patterns cut into them and the many layers of lacquer hardened like a stone - they'll last as long as the Grand Canal or the Great Wall. Sometimes, when I look at those boxes, I think they're how a great city must look, seen from the eye of Heaven. Walls within walls, streets and avenues, palaces and temples, houses and courtyards, all packed tight as a geometric pattern on a box. Dynasties come and go, war and disease, famine and flood. But Nanjing and Beijing are still standing; and even if they weren't, the idea of them would still be there, preserved like a garden, in every lacquer box.

Whenever I think of these things, I feel an exquisite pang of longing. I feel oddly depressed; it's almost like I know too much simply to be in the moment anymore, to enjoy what I used to relish so uncritically. I'm aware that there is a bigger, far more complicated world out there than I'd ever realized, and just like the students at Beijing University, I've glimpsed it only fleetingly, peripherally. I've sensed the vast expanse of my own ignorance now. I feel antsy and constricted and a deep, almost sexual yearning for velocity, for some sort of raw, transcendent experience that I cannot even begin to articulate.