Have been following a few expatriate blogs for a while, mostly in meta-reminiscence of my time spent back living in Taiwan. While China differs substantially from Taiwan, I from time to time come across snippets of everyday life that are sort of timeless (or, more accurately, “placeless”, if such a word existed with the same connotations).
Brendan O’Kane had some sublime stuff to say about words, that was stirring enough to quote here and make me confess the guilty pleasure of vicariously reliving times past…
I’m not doing a good job of describing this, and I’m sorry.
Zhuangzi said: Snares are for catching rabbits. Once you’ve got the rabbits, you can forget the snares. Words are for catching ideas; once you’ve got the idea, you can forget the words.
And sometimes the words aren’t enough to catch the idea, and all you have are memories, mutable and imperfect, to tell you that you saw something beautiful, something that was absolutely of the moment and can never be the same again.