This essay has just been published in Kosmopolis magazine in German translation. So I thought I should publish the English version over here. It was written just after the Lunar New Year of 2025. I should reassure readers that the biopsy mentioned right at the end turned out to be clear. On the other hand, the world is still chaotic and unpredictable. I suppose you can’t have everything.
Spring, Like Us, Grows Old
“When I was fifteen, I was set upon learning; at thirty, I took a stand; at forty, I was free of doubts; at fifty, I understood the decrees of the heavens; at sixty, I had attuned my listening; at seventy, whatever my heart desired, it did not go beyond the limits of appropriateness.”
— Confucius.
It was my thirty-seventh birthday when I decided to learn Chinese. My thirty-seventh birthday was also Confucius’s 2559th birthday. I took this to be an auspicious sign.
I didn’t really have any single good reason to learn Chinese. But it was an idea that had been brewing for a long time. It was something about the sheer unfamiliarity of the language. It was something to do about growing old. It was something about the thought that one day, I could retire to the hills, like some kind of philosopher-sage, and translate Chinese poetry and philosophy. And it was something about the fact that it seemed to me terrible to die without first having learned Chinese.
None of these reasons were sufficient on their own. But taken together, they seemed compelling. And so, on the day I entered my thirty-eight year, I went online and enrolled in a beginner’s Chinese class at the university across town. A week later, I was sitting in class with thirty other students, getting to grips with the unfamiliar sounds of a new language.
It was hard at first. Most of my fellow students were university students, fresh out of school and half my age. They had young brains that miraculously retained what they had learned. They listened and repeated and remembered. But I spluttered and stuttered my way through the first semester. I was envious of their minds, more agile than my own. The words wouldn’t stick. The grammar wouldn’t stick. I mixed up characters. I couldn’t string together a sentence.
But one of the benefits of age is stubbornness. So I upped my game. I became obsessed with cramming Chinese characters. I spent my evenings picking my way through Chinese texts. I listened to podcasts as I walked back and forth to work. By the end of the year, only seven students were still standing—stubbornness has its uses, and I could hold my own in a simple conversation. My exam results were decent. I was making progress.
The first year came to an end, and I realised that there was no point in giving up now. I didn’t want all that effort to be for nothing. And if I wanted to one day retire to the hills to translate poetry and philosophy, I knew I’d just have to keep on going. So I studied for another year of classes. And after that, I kept on going.
On my fortieth birthday, I was in Norway for work, examining a PhD. I booked a tiny berth on a boat that was moored in the harbour in Bergen. The decision was as much practical as it was romantic: Norway was expensive, and the boat offered the cheapest accommodation in town. But being on the boat also suited me. I was the only guest in the boat-hotel, and my tiny berth was right up in the bows. In the evening, I bought myself bread, cheese and a beer from the supermarket, and I sat below deck, listening to the waves lapping the sides of the boat. By this time, I had made some progress with my Chinese. I still couldn’t speak much, but I could read. And so, on that solitary birthday spent in Bergen, I spent my evenings translating Classical Chinese poems.
There was Drinking Alone by Du Mu (803-852).
Outside the window—
fierce wind, snow.
I huddle by the stove
open a jar of wine;
wouldn’t it be better
to be in a fishing boat
in the rain,
sail down,
sleeping on the autumn river?
There was Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072), consoling himself over a glass of ale:
At forty. I am not yet past it,
but still, I sign my papers:
‘Old Drunkard.’
Then there was Liu Zongyuan (773 –819), feeling the creeping advance of old age, but having a good time nevertheless:
The fog is dark,
the river laps the steps,
the moon is bright,
flowers veil the window.
We are not yet done
with getting drunk—
gazing at each other,
our hair not yet white.
And there was Li Qingzhao (c. 1084 – c. 1155), her hair grey, decking herself in flowers.
Drunk, I put flowers
in my hair.
Do not laugh:
it is pitiable—
spring, like us,
grows old.
What was it about the Chinese poets and philosophers, and their obsession with ageing? I read and re-read these poets obsessively. And then, up in the bows of the boat, I slept well — cocooned in a tiny wooden berth, tipsy on strong Swedish beer, the moon bright.
One night, it rained. The sound kept me awake. It was so loud, so beautiful, it was almost overwhelming: Wouldn’t it be better to be in a fishing boat in the rain?
I was forty years old. Unlike Confucius, I was not yet free of doubts. Doubts, if anything, seemed to just multiply, even if they worried me less and less. But, like Ouyang Xiu, I was not yet past it. And that was something.
As I child, I was told our time was limited. I was brought up in a vicarage, my father a priest. And though he never talked about God, nor did I ever find myself a believer, there was something in the atmosphere: a sense of urgency. It was like a kind of demand, a call to pay heed to the number of our days — like breath, like a passing shadow, like grass, like the flowers of the field over which the wind passes. Time was limited, and it mattered how we spent it.
I do not know when I first heard about Bede’s sparrow, but for years, the image haunted me. A small bird flutters briefly through a mead hall, passing from darkness to darkness. This, Bede says, is our life: so briefly in the light, it is hard to even conceive of, surrounded by an unfathomable dark.
These images seeped into me. And when in my twenties, I got into practising Buddhism seriously, I came across another blizzard of metaphors that only served to reinforce this sense that time was limited, and always slipping away from us. Impermanence was a demon holding all existence in its claws. Life was fleeting, a mirage, a phantom, a dream, a flash of lightning in the clouds, a drop of dew, a bubble floating in the stream until, with a pop!, it disappears. My life took on a kind of anxious urgency. I meditated — as some texts recommended — as if my hair was on fire. I spent weeks on retreat, alone and with others. I got up early, sat on my meditation cushions for hours on end, ate frugally, and kept death in mind as if it might (and it might, of course, it always might…) spring out at any minute and carry me away. I saw life as a problem in need of a solution, old age and death as things to stare down and overcome.
It was only in my thirties that I began to lose this taste for urgency, just when many of my peers were beginning to look anxiously at the shrinking of the time remaining to them. And the shift in my relationship with this strange often imperceptible process of growing old has, for me, become intertwined with poetry and philosophy written in Chinese. Because when, from my late thirties onward, I started to saturate myself in Chinese poetry and philosophy, I found that the stories and metaphors that had haunted me for so many decades started to fall away. The images of feasting halls and sparrows, bubbles in the stream, seemed not so much wrong as beside the point. Life and death seemed less and less to be problems in urgent need of solutions. How can it be that as the time still available to me — by any reasonable calculation — has dwindled, I have found myself becoming increasingly insouciant?
Perhaps no thinker better expresses this insouciance in the face of old age and death than Confucius. The popular image of Confucius is of a stern moralist. And yet, there is a sweetness to Confucius that is often overlooked. According to the Analects, the Duke of Shu once asked Confucius’s disciple Zilu to describe his teacher. Zilu was at a loss for words. “But why didn’t you just say this,” Confucius asked Zilu. “That I am simply a person—one so full of passion he forgets to eat, one so joyful that he forgets his worries, one who does not think about old age as it approaches?”
There is something I love about this blithe unconcern in the face of time’s passing, this willingness to forget old age. And this is something I find not only in Confucius. It is there in Li Qingzhao too. She is full of sadness, but does not let her sadness become a tragedy. It may be that spring grows old. Nevertheless, there she is, getting drunk, sticking flowers in her greying hair. It is something I find also in Du Fu (712 – 770 CE), the saddest of all Chinese poets, having a bad day as he clambers through the mountains alone:
Difficulty, bitterness, regret,
so many hairs now turned to frost.
Old and decrepit, I stop,
drink a cup of coarse wine.
And the same thing is there in Tao Yuanming (365–427 CE) too, as he hangs out with his friends, talking nonsense the way old people do.
Old-timers,
we talk nonsense,
pass the cups,
forget whose turn it is.
Not even knowing
who we are,
how can we know,
what matters most?_
Idle leisure,
we lose all bearings
in the dregs: when drunk,
all flavours are profound.
Ageing, drinking, remembering, forgetting, lamenting. Giving up on big stuff. Returning to the textures of life, where all flavours are profound.
How do you not think about old age as it approaches? How do you forget? Should you, even? In his book Les Transformations Silencieuses, the philosopher François Jullien writes:
Mais la philosophie européenne n’en a pas moins fait miroiter la mort à l’horizon comme ce point culminant, fascinant, apocalyptique, vers quoi tout converge et se dénouera subitement : où se révèle enfin, déchirant le voile, la Vérité attendue.
Nonetheless, European philosophy has dangled death on the horizon like a culminating point — fascinating, apocalyptic — towards which everything converges and where it will suddenly unravel: where there will be at last revealed, the veil torn, the Truth we have awaited.
But the thinkers and poets and philosophers I have come to love over the past decade and a half have no time for that. As Jullien writes, in Chinese thought, death is rarely, if at all, seen as a great unveiling, an encounter with truth, an unravelling. Instead, it is the culmination of the ten thousand silent transformations that are always already underway. And as for old age, Jullien writes, it is something that has “always already begun.” Vieillir a toujours déjà commencé.
Silent transformation: 潛移默化 qián yí mò huà, literally “hidden movement and quiet change.” The way you sit on a train, and the countryside slowly becomes city, with no perceptible boundary. The way you look in the mirror and think, “my hair is grey.” The way everything is always already begun and always already ending, both at the same time. We are obsessed, Jullien says, with events. We imagine the world is stable, and that this stability is punctuated with breaks and ruptures. This leads us to imagine that life is drama and tragedy. But these hidden movements and quiet changes sidestep this drama and this tragedy.
They are like the breathing in and out of existence.
If old age has always already begun, what is there to fear? After all, we already know how to do this. Getting old? There’s nothing too it. We’ve been doing it forever. Sure, there are sufferings and aches and pains, there are illnesses and sorrows. There is separation; there is death. But these things have always already been there. So why not forget, when we can forget? Why not, like Confucius, allow ourselves to be too joyful to remember? Why not, like Li Qingzhao, get drunk and put flowers in our grey hair? Why not, like Tao Yuanming, pass the cup and talk nonsense with our friends, unable to say what matters most? Why not, like Du Fu, stride up the mountainside, stopping for breath and swigging a cup of coarse wine?
Zilu, the story goes, asked Confucius about death. Confucius replied, ‘You don’t yet know life. How can you know death?’
Perhaps it is only when we allow ourselves to forget does it dawn on us: the big secret of death is that there is no big secret. The grand mystery is that there is no grand mystery.
Perhaps it is only when we shrug everything off—even death—that the world floods back in. Old age and death, time itself… what are these things other than abstractions? So why not let insouciance take hold. In insouciance, we are returned to life, to the business of living.
It is not that Confucius is indifferent towards death. It is just that he is capable of forgetting. When asked what he most aspired to, Confucius replied, “To comfort the elderly, to trust my friends, to cherish the young.” When asked about the dead, he said, “Should a friend die, with nobody to care for them, I would bury them.” And when his dear friend Yan Hui died, he mourned so bitterly his disciples reprimanded him; but Confucius replied, “If I am not to mourn for this man, then for whom?”
What is life? Comforting is life. Trusting is life. Cherishing is life. Caring is life. Burying the dead is life. Mourning is life. Life is all there is. This feasting hall where we sparrows flutter and fret—this is the whole deal. There is no vast darkness outside.
Life fills up everything, and there is nowhere that is unfilled.
When I turned fifty, several years ago, Confucius turned 2572. It was during the Covid pandemic, and I did not have a big party. I was in Bulgaria at the time. I must have celebrated somehow, with friends and loved ones, but I can’t remember how.
Since turning fifty, the decrees of heaven have remained as obscure as they ever have been. Nevertheless, some time around my fiftieth birthday, when I thought back to the boat in the harbour of Bergen where I celebrated the turning of the decade before, I realised that over these ten years, something had shifted in me. Time had come to seem less of an issue, less of a problem. The imagined dark outside the mead hall no longer pressed on me quite so much as it once had. And if it was not that I had found a solution to the puzzle, it was perhaps more that I had started to wonder if there was really anything to solve, after all.
Somewhere, in these silent transformations, I had started to learn what it means to grow old. Maybe this was what Confucius meant, when he talked about knowing the decrees of heaven. But who can say?
I am still more than half a decade off my sixtieth birthday. I hope I make it that far. I hope we all do, even though the future seems unstable, hard to read, often terrifying. But if I do, it seems unlikely I will find my listening fully attuned, as Confucius did. Nor do I expect, if I reach seventy, to find to my astonishment, that I can do whatever my heart desires, without going beyond the limits of appropriateness. Confucius and I are very different people.
Still, there has been some progress. My Chinese is better than it was at thirty-seven, at forty, or at fifty. It is not yet fluent, but it is good enough. Sometimes, I think it would have been good to have started younger. But then I think: what does it matter? Learning Chinese has never been about mastery. Instead, coming relatively late to this new language has put into play a myriad of silent transformations. In unexpected ways, it has rewoven my existence—this existence that has always already begun, and that is and always already ending. And if I’ve learned nothing else, perhaps it is enough that I have learned a measure of insouciance. Or that I have learned unlearned the habit I once had of seeking out great truths and big secrets.
As for what is left, after all those questions subside—here among the dregs where we risk losing all our bearings—it is something remarkably simple. Caring and comforting, cherishing and trusting. Watching the silent transformations as they unfold.
It is a Monday night in Taiwan, in the southern city of Tainan. Last week was the spring festival, a flurry of firecrackers. It is the year of the snake. Recently, there have been earthquakes that have shaken the house. Next week, I go to the hospital for biopsy results. I am hoping for the best. Yesterday, I attended a book launch with friends. The event was in Chinese, and I made myself useful translating. Later, we sat together in the street and ate spicy food, talking nonsense and laughing. There are ships and military aircraft in the Taiwan Strait. When I look at the news, it seems as if everything sliding into chaos, as if the world is always on the brink of ending. These are the facts, or some of them.
Who could make sense of it all?
But tonight, because the world has not yet ended, and because the house is still — a murmur of the TV coming from upstairs, the voices of the neighbours across the street, the sound of wind — I read Zhang Kejiu (1270-1348) who, in his old age, wrote a poem called Bookish Business, up in the Mountains. And I am grateful for his company.
Several rooms,
a thatched cottage,
stacks of books,
ten thousand scrolls,
growing old
in my village home.
Up in the mountains,
what matters?
Pine-trees in flower,
brewing wine;
rivers in spring,
simmering tea.
Image: Zha Shibiao: Landscape Album in Various Styles: Spring Plowing, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
