Where is "life is a wilderness, not a track" cured?

Interface News Reporter | Dong Ziqi

Interface News Editor | Yellow Moon

The phrase "life is a wilderness, not a track" has recently become popular on the Internet, and extends to the sentence "life is a wilderness, absenteeism from work and school". As mentioned in the interface culture chat room column, it is common on social networks to hold a "Chiikawa" doll to take pictures on airplanes or in natural scenery and quote "life is a wilderness, not a track", showing that virtual characters can easily have a life that we cannot achieve.

The origin of this phrase is debatable, but many young people say they have found healing in it—the wilderness points to the revelation of nature and a variety of choices, and the track is a path that must be pursued in a straight line. But how does the wilderness heal people's hearts, and how far is the orbit from the truth of life?

The popularity of "Life is the Wilderness".

The wilderness destroys the chickens and dogs of life

In 12 Birds, Heal You, Charlie Corbett, a British freelance journalist who has experienced the loss of his mother, talks about how he wants to heal himself with nature, but sitting in nature and listening to everything grows sounds easy, but it is difficult to achieve because people always want to escape from silent moments. When he was alone, he realized that his thoughts were discouraging, terrifying, and not at all calm. It was only when he threw away his phone and connected with the land around him that he gradually recovered and experienced nature with an inner state of mind – autumn is characterized by inner calm, when everything returns to its daily form from the great stresses of midsummer and holidays, nature slowly fades into winter with a sigh of happiness, but before the blizzard comes, everyone, including nature itself, can take a breather.

The feeling of the wilderness comes from the understanding of "taking a breath". When Corbett Xi used to going out to the garden, or for a walk, it goes from getting basic fresh air and exercising to pure fun. The individual is no longer a solitary individual, but one of the species in a diverse universe, "You are no longer the protagonist in the tragedy of your own situation, but a small part of the great epic of nature." "Hearing the song of the goldfinch in the summer makes you forget the anger and nervousness, and in the autumn the migration of the flock of geese is spectacular and heart-pounding. Gradually, he learned to recognize the song of birds, just like he knew his neighbors.

12 Birds, Heal You

Translated by Charlie Corbett

Nanjing University Press 2023-10

British writer Helen MacDonald had a similar experience when observing swifts. Swifts fly up to 8,000 feet in flocks, collecting information about air temperature, wind speed and direction as they go, "and all they do is fly so high in the sky that they know exactly where they are and what to do next." "At this point, one can take a hint from the life of a swift. Ordinary life is trivial, hopes and worries, costs and benefits, plans and distractions, and people need to build their own fortifications like books, dogs, and crafts to spend a long life, but they can't just live in these things, because then they can't be sure where they should go. Swifts do not always fly, and most of the time they live in the air below the boundary layer, eating, mating, bathing, and drinking, but if they want to understand the more important powers, they must fly over the border layer and exchange information with their companions.

Both stories prove that those who have seen the wilderness will understand that nature is not only a breeze and a pleasure, but also has its own desires, emotions and vitality. It seems to remind us that the construction, the emotional relationships, and the ideals of life that keep us busy are so relative and limited. One should radiate from the desolation and ferocity of the wilderness, as Thoreau put it:

"Why does the melancholy and grieving storm sound so pleasant to my ears? I think it's the scraps that have destroyed our smooth sailing lives. ”

Destroying chicken bits and pieces – rather than soothing the everyday and banality – is what the wilderness is all about. This is not quite consistent with the fact that dolls happily skip work and school, and it is also very different from the equally popular "life experience theory". The "Theory of Life Experience" comforts young people like this: "Baby, you are just here to experience life, and you can't take anything with you, that is, to experience interesting things and unforgettable people." On the one hand, such words do relieve the tension of life, and on the other hand, they replace the wilderness with "fun" and "experience" as an amusement park full of pink bubbles, and narcissistically imagine the self-narcissistic teenager who is eternally young and eternally tearful.

The healing text with cartoon images received 60,000+ likes

Lonely and anxious

People read emotional healing and life revelations from the wilderness, but there is always a reason to escape the silence and fill themselves with busyness and fulfillment. Thoreau said that in adulthood, man seems to be put to a special and petty use, spending his life carrying out a particular disposition, because he is not to be left to look around in order to comprehend life and the various matters of life. Busyness, purpose, and certainty seem to constitute an invisible prison in which people sit indoors.

Of course, there are also people who protest this, such as the young protagonist of Robert Walzer's novel "The Donald Brothers and Sisters", who repeatedly hit a wall in society and wanders in a junior position, once lamented, "How stupid is a bank building in the spring!" The building looks stupid in the spring light, so why don't people come out from behind the counter and liberate themselves from the work of copying papers? A person who is absent from work will not be able to do every job for a few days, or even stay in one place for a long time, because he cannot stand the constraints of the environment and rules.

Why do people stay in the bank building day after day? Are spring and wilderness more frightening than buildings? Perhaps people are more afraid of self-emancipation, or see it as a kind of self-exile, than to speak rashly about absenteeism and absenteeism?

Popular healing discourse on the Internet

But this goal is not so easy to achieve. The ancient Roman Stoicist philosopher Seneca argued in On the Transience of Life that "living for oneself" is like a false and sweet fantasy that urges people to work willingly. Even those who live in a country house and enjoy the tranquility of the sofa do not know how to accompany themselves, and they are often cautious about feasts, entertains, and enjoyment, and such a life can only be regarded as "idleness" rather than leisure, and is still full of anxiety rather than tranquility:

"Whether rich or poor, there will always be reasons for people to be upset. Life is like this, pushed forward by one longing after another. We're always craving to be laid-back, but we've never really enjoyed it. ”

Rolling forward tracks

Tracks, always associated with concepts such as progress, rolling forward, clear direction, single process, etc. In this year's hit TV series "The Long Season", the train driver played by Fan Wei shouted loudly to the audience, "Look forward, don't look back!" It means that the trauma of the past is a foregone conclusion, it is better to grasp the present and embrace the future. Having been on the same track for many years, the professional experience of a train driver has shaped the wisdom of "look ahead, don't look back".

The track is forward, and the time that people live is not always like this. In the interview, Borges quoted the British philosopher Bradley as saying that time does not always flow from the present to the future, but on the contrary, from the future to us, we always go back to the future, and the future is the moment when it transforms or dissolves into the past. This idea inspired Borges and alleviated his fear of future surgery, because since the relationship between the future and the past is reversed, the chain of cause and effect is not as clear as people think.

If Borges's metaphor is too mystical, we can also refer to the view of neuroscientist Oliver Sachs in The River of Consciousness. Quoting Borges's metaphor of the river of time, Sachs argues that it is not so much a river as a string of beads. The moments of life are like snapshots in a movie, which are connected by the trajectory and main axis of life, and the feeling of connecting and integrating with each other at different moments makes time continuous.

He uses patients' stories as evidence that it is consciousness that makes life feel like it flows from the past to the future. Many patients temporarily lose their sense of visual continuity and movement during a migraine attack, and what they see in front of them is a flickering freeze-frame image, which he calls "cinematic vision" because the patient always compares the image he sees to a slow-moving movie. In other patients with Parkinson's syndrome, he has observed consciousness being cut into pieces, disintegrating into snapshots, and perhaps suspending consciousness for hours at a time. One example in the book is of a woman who goes into the bathroom to take a shower and the water in the bathroom floods and she can't move because she pauses her consciousness when the water is 2 centimeters deep, "trapped in that eternal moment." "If life isn't even a rolling river, but just a cinematic snapshot connected by feeling, how can it be considered such an indispensable track?

The River of Consciousness

Translated by Oliver Sachs by Chen Xiaofei

Houlang Beijing United Publishing Co., Ltd. 2023-7

In his letter to the young poet, the poet Rilke exhorts the other to settle for the track of his profession, to be content with monotony and loneliness, for all professions are more or less the same, "is it not the case with all professions, which are all unreasonable demands and hostility to the individual, and which is also hated by many who are silent and reluctant and dissatisfied with their dull duties." The profession that the young man now needs to cope with is not necessarily more burdened by Xi, prejudices and fallacies than any other profession, so what he needs to do is to start with small, dishonorable things, "endure well and do not be discouraged." If you really feel lost, go into the wilderness, "and the night, and the wind—the wind that blows through the woods and sweeps across the fields, and is full of things to share with the animals and with the animals." "The fact that we have expanded from the loneliness of our respective orbits to the vast and vast may point to a glimmer of hope.