This is the seventy-eighth chapter in Other People’s Thoughts, a China Heritage series inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.
Pierre remarked that the resulting modest volume of quotations was ‘idiosyncratically compiled for the amusement of idle readers’ (see Simon Leys, Other People’s Thoughts, 2007). Our aim is similar: to amuse our readers (idle or otherwise); as is our modus operandi: to build up an idiosyncratic compilation, one that reflects the interests of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology and its coterie.
In collecting this material, and by adding to it over time, we accord also with a Chinese literary practice in which quotations — sometimes called yǔlù 語錄, literally ‘recorded sayings’ — have a particular history, and a powerful resonance.
The most famous collection of recorded sayings is The Analects 論語, compiled by disciples of Confucius. Then there is the timeless 5000-words of Laozi’s The Tao and the Power 道德經, as well as the Chan/Zen 禪宗 tradition of what in English are known by the Japanese term kōan 公案, dating from the Tang dynasty. Modern imitations range from the political bon mots of Mao Zedong to excerpts from the prolix prose of Xi Jinping’s tireless speech writers, and published snippets from arm-chair philosophers and motivational speakers.
Other People’s Thoughts also finds inspiration in the ‘poetry talks’ 詩話, ‘casual jottings’ 筆記 and ‘marginalia’ 眉批 of China’s literary tradition.
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As is now customary in Other People’s Thoughts, this chapter in the series also includes videos and illustrative material. My thanks to Catherine Churchman and Jianying Zha for permission to quote their 金句 / verbal gems.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
26 May 2026
A heart far from the fray, just as
from a grand mountain the moon.
Regardless of the face of things, in
facing life nothing is such a big deal.
— Lao Shu, painted to record a thought that welled up in my mind
following a trip to Huangshan in the late spring of 2017
Source:
- 《老樹日曆》，2026年5月25日，宜不管了, trans. GR Barmé
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Other People’s Thoughts LXXVIII
Taiwan Travelogue
“Taiwanese people are suffering from an identity crisis. Some of us believe ourselves to be Chinese and then others believe that we are Taiwanese, and I wanted to express that somehow through my book. As Taiwanese people, we need to ask ourselves now – do we want to go back to being colonised? Do we want to have to live like that again? Be second-class citizens in our own land? I refuse.”
— Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, winner of the 2026 International Booker prize
有些人認為藝術與文學必須遠離政治，但我認為，文學無法自外於它所生長的土壤，就此而言，文學本質上從未脫離政治。綜觀臺灣文學發展史，百年來我們其實不斷地在探問：臺灣人想要什麼樣的未來？臺灣人想要什麼樣的國家？時至今日，《臺灣漫遊錄》也是加入這個探問的其中一部小說作品。
臺灣人歷經殖民政權，面臨侵略威脅，在力量懸殊的強權面前，文學有用嗎？——而我始終相信文學有力量。文學看似緩慢，但總是堅定行動。文學通常安靜，卻沒有阻礙信念遠播。翻譯會造成時差，但可以跨越時間與空間的限制。我相信文學有力量，因為在思想的世界裡，文學從來沒有放棄堅守自己，也沒有放棄與他人對話。
謝謝國際布克獎。謝謝本書的譯者金翎。謝謝促成我走到這裡的每一個人。請讓我將收尾的這段話獻給我的故土家鄉——臺灣文學的百年探問，實際正是臺灣人對自由與平等的百年追求。能夠生為一名臺灣人，是我的幸運；能夠以臺灣作家的身分站在這裡，是我的驕傲。
謝謝大家。
— 楊双子獲獎感言
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王劍論台灣
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Dictator bling
Not all the esthetic taste displayed in Dictator Style has a Machiavellian value. Some of it is merely, as York says, “a very wild, free range, bling taste.” And within those exceptionally wide boundaries there are some basic definitions of the style:
Go big. If you’re going for a French chateau, double it.
Repro not real old. Go for reproductions, not antiques because real old is shabby.
Think French.
And most of all: Go for the gold.“The basic esthetic of a petro dollar world,” says York, “is to do it in gold.”
And why French?
“Pre-revolutionary French furniture is the new big money style of the last 150 years. It’s the language of international wealth because it’s either gilded or covered with gilded metal.’
In other words, French regency is preferred because of the gold.
— Brent Bambury, Gadhafi’s gold-plated excesses outlive him, CBC News, 22 October 2011
The Tech Oligarchs
“They know that American society is going to turn against them in big ways because they are the greatest and most illegitimate pirates who ever lived,” said Leon Wieseltier, editor of the journal Liberties. “Tech is the single most powerful force that was ever arrayed against the humanities.
“There is a huge difference between knowledge and information, and these asinine people have taught our population that all of knowledge can be reduced to the status of information,” Wieseltier said. “Press a button, you got your answer. So the whole humanistic mentality of mystery, obscurity, patience, beauty — it’s the opposite of what this technology has inculcated.”
— Maureen Dowd, What A.I. Kant Do, The New York Times, 16 May 2026
Billionaire Brain
… that special blend of ignorance and arrogance that occurs all too frequently in men who believe that their success in accumulating personal wealth means that they understand everything, no need to do any homework.
— Paul Krugman, 26 March 2025
The poor don’t get to dream.
— Robby Hoffman
On Nicholas Kristof
I’m reminded of the Rebbe of Klausenburg, Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Halberstam (1905–1994). He lost 11 of his children in the Holocaust. He told his students, “it could have been worse.” So they asked him, “What could have been worse than the horrors of that dark period?”
His answer was beautiful in its moral strength – “It would have been worse if we had been the murderers.”
— A Brief History of Israeli Denialism, Or: Should we believe that the IDF raped Palestinian prisoners with dogs?, Pessimism of the Will, 13 May 2026
Delete Emails, Save Water
Last summer, when it failed to rain every day in Britain, the government provided citizens with a helpful list of ways they could personally save water. Take shorter showers, avoid watering the lawn, that sort of thing. The last item on its list read: “Delete old emails and pictures as data centers require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.” Maybe this sounds like it would make sense, if you’ve vaguely heard that data centers use a lot of water. But there are some problems. For one, the internet is global. The data centers storing your e-mails are probably not drawing from the same water sources as the toilet you read them on. What’s more, storing an e-mail for a month uses up about a thousandth of a millilitre of water, equivalent to a fiftieth of a raindrop. You could delete everything you have on the cloud and it would still do less to improve the drought than would spitting in your local reservoir. What does require extra power is actively writing to a drive—by, say, deleting old e-mails in an attempt to save water. This advice is roughly equivalent to the British state encouraging you to help save hospital beds by not stepping on the sidewalk cracks.
— Sam Kriss, The Generation That Will Always Be Too Young to Smoke, The New Yorker,
雙皇: The world’s two most powerful men, performing bullshit before history
Trump is ten centimeters taller than Xi. This is documented. This is the kind of fact that withstands every regime’s grammar. And so the cushion engineers went to work, you see, because the photograph is what would carry, and the photograph could not be permitted to say what reality says. A softer cushion for Trump. A firmer cushion for Xi. A higher sofa, in the trade-talks room, for Xi. And underneath all of it, beneath the silk and the lacquer and the choreography of state, Xi was walking awkwardly — visibly, painfully — on lifts inside his shoes. His feet, in one seated frame, did not touch the floor.
Two men dressed as emperors, performing equivalent stature for the camera, while one of them could not put his feet on the ground.
— Mike Brock, The Simulation Has Collapsed, Notes from the Circus, 16 May 2026
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Putin Killed Her
“I love you all, and think about you, but I must leave; to live has become intolerable ever since Putin attacked Ukraine and began killing innocent people, while thousands here are constantly being put in prison, where they suffer and die for being, as I am, against the war and the murders … I tried to help them, but my strength has ended and night and day I am tormented by my powerlessness. I am ashamed, but I have given up. Please forgive me.”
— from Nina Litvinova’s suicide note
Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.
— Rumi
Maxxing to the Max
I have alienated everyone from my past because with all the focus on my looks, I never spent any time personalitymaxxing. So while I am on my deathbed, I am joined only by several of my worst-smelling Patreon subscribers, who have been taking selfies with me for clout since they arrived. Death cannot come soon enough, mostly because I’m excited to finally meet Charlie Kirk and achieve alpha status in the afterlife by telling him how sad his wife isn’t.
— Josh Gondelman, At Long Last, I Have Maxximized My Looks, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, 15 May 2026
Brexit
Caratacus, a barbarian chieftain who was captured and brought to Rome and later pardoned by Claudius, wandered about the city after his liberation; and after beholding its splendour and its magnitude he exclaimed: ‘And can you, then, who have got such possessions and so many of them, covet our poor huts?’
— Caratacus, according to Dio Cassius
躺平
有的人生來就在羅馬，有的人生來就是牛馬。
Should you use Al to write?
“Why would I? It’d be like hiring someone to have sex for you. For anything creative, why would I want to use it when it’s the very creative language that | like?
“I suspect we’ll tire of that quickly. I’d rather read a bad short story by a human than a good one by a computer. What you want in art is connection. It’s connection with another human being.”
— Yann Martel, author Life of Pi
Starry Night
You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. ..
The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt. In our universe she is small, no doubt; but so are the galaxies, so is everything—and so what? But in theirs there was an absolute standard of comparison. The furthest sphere, Dante’s maggior corpo is, quite simply and finally, the largest object in existence. The word ‘small’ as applied to Earth thus takes on a far more absolute significance.
Again, because the medieval universe is finite, it has a shape, the perfect spherical shape, containing within itself an ordered variety. Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest—trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building.
The ‘space’ of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical. This explains why all sense of the pathless, the baffling, and the utterly alien—all agoraphobia—is so markedly absent from medieval poetry when it leads us, as so often, into the sky.
Dante, whose theme might have been expected to invite it, never strikes that note. The meanest modern writer of science-fiction can, in that department, do more for you than he. Pascal’s terror at le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis never entered his mind. He is like a man being conducted through an immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless sea.
— CS Lewis
Colbert’s Exit
Colbert’s decision to make the show an only slightly more self-indulgent version of his usual fare felt like an acknowledgment that no spectacle he manufactured could hope to rival the spectacle of his firing, which revealed just how totally and readily the corporate media had bequeathed its dignity to Trump. Private greed and public decline: what nice twins!
— Vinson Cunningham, A Funeral for Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show”, The New Yorker, 22 May 2026
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Jacob Collier’s Commencement
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Crook Looks
“When I was young there were beatniks. Hippies. Punks. Gangsters. Now you’re a hacktivist. Which I would probably be if I was 20. Shuttin’ down MasterCard. But there’s no look to that lifestyle!
“Besides just wearing a bad outfit with bad posture. Has WikiLeaks caused a look? No! I’m mad about that. If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, it seems to me he should at least have an outfit for that.”
— John Waters on the sorry style of today’s rebels (WS)
AI
The problem with AI is that it’s good enough to put me out of a job, but it’s not good enough to fuck me yet.
— Catherine Churchman, historian, Victoria University of Wellington, 24 May 2026
Geopolitical Therapy
Lurching from promises of liberating Iranians to threats that “a whole civilization will die,” Trump embodies an old national pathology: a compulsive pattern of infatuation, expectation, frustration, recrimination, revulsion, hostility, and reinfatuation. His abusive relationships with foreign countries, untempered by any knowledge of the history that has made or unmade them, reenact an American tragedy whose script was written long before he assumed office. Interventions in foreign countries have long been attempts to refashion America’s identity and to reinvigorate, through external validation, the weakening faith of Americans in their own institutions.
— Pankaj Mishra, Geopolitical Narcissism, Harper’s Magazine, June 2026
To Build
When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them: ‘See! This our fathers did for us!’
— John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture
The 24/7 Banquet of AI Slop
I hate that when I read basically anything now I’m constantly on alert, twitching like a schizo in an underpass. Is this thing really what it says it is? Is this person actually a robot in disguise? Nice little personal essay you’ve got there, lady, but I know what you really are; time to get my knife out, time to start digging around under your skin until I find the wires. AI is a bad writer, but that’s not even close to being the whole problem. Let’s say it wasn’t. Let’s say they finally fixed the machine so it was really good, so its default setting was to write exactly like VS Naipaul. The result would be a world in which you’re constantly confronted by cold emails from VS Naipaul, bubbly magazine articles by VS Naipaul, signs in shop windows in which VS Naipaul tells you about the new opening hours, strangely flaccid sexts VS Naipaul ghostwrote for someone on Feeld, and websites in which VS Naipaul fails to say anything in particular about grilled meats. This would not be an improvement; it might even be worse. Any world in which there is only one literary voice, blanketing everything in the exact same tone, is a nightmare.
— Sam Kriss, If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you, 25 May 2026
Dumb and Dumber
As former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chief of staff Chad Mizelle told CNN: “Part of the reason the weaponization work has been difficult is that you need people who are MAGA and who are really competent.” This is, he explained, “a very small group of people.”
— Kate Gilbert, Why Is the Weaponization Report So … Normal?, Lawfare, 14 May 2026
Trump Is Dying
So here we are. A 79-year-old man, swollen of extremity and bruised of hand, looking like the victim of a zombie bite by denying it until he turns, shuffling between Walter Reed and a half-built ballroom nobody asked for, with an approval rating in free fall, a base finally asking quiet questions about grocery prices, a press corps too cowed to say out loud what they all know, and a clock, biological, cultural, and political, that he cannot bully into stopping.
He is not coming back from this. There is no third act. There is only the long, undignified, makeup-smeared decline of a man and a movement whose moment has passed, narrating itself ever more loudly into an ever emptier hall, a frowzy barfly of a man, replaying past glories that never happened and hoping you won’t notice the bad wig.
Trump is dying.
— Rick Wilson, Trump Is Dying, 26 May 2026
兩個法寶
共產黨執政以來一直有兩大法寶——暴力和謊言。這也是中國統治的老傳統，就這兩個把手，一個是法，一個是德，就是儒法兩家。到毛以後，一個是槍桿子，一個是筆桿子。筆桿子負責製造謊言的。槍桿子就是暴力，這是不用說的，文革當中普遍暴力化。不光是軍隊，所有的人都在武鬥。
可是這個謊言的機器從來沒有停止，而且文革之後很快就把文革的真相封殺了。所以隔了十幾年、二十年，這個事情的真相已經不能講了，沒有人講。可能你爸爸當年私下還會講，而我知道現在很多中國的父母，為了孩子的前程，為了他不要變成一個異類，影響他的前途，在家裡他什麼都不講。就是這樣，為了要生存。所以真相早已經沒有了，完全是一個徹底虛幻的幻像。
— 查建英，不明白博客
Knocking at the Gate
In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers and the murder must be insulated — cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs locked up and sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested — laid asleep — tranced — racked into a dread armistice; time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that, when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.
— Thomas de Quincey, On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, 1823
The Search for Truth
The search for truth is an essential element of democracy, which is itself a means of contributing to the common good. When questions about what is true lose their appeal, and a pragmatism takes hold that is content with what appears useful or effective, then democratic life is weakened. After all, democracy does not consist of rules and procedures alone, but above all of a solid concordance with the facts and a genuine commitment to the good of individuals and society as a whole.
Indifference to the truth leads, slowly but surely, to a descent into totalitarianism.
As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, the ideal subjects of such regimes are not so much those who are ideologically convinced, but rather “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
— Pope Leo XIV, ‘Safeguarding Humanity at a Time of Transformation’, Magnifica Humanitas, released 25 May 2026
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What did we do to deserve this?
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人生三晃
一晃，大了。
二晃，老了。
三晃，没了。
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