10 Creators I Love, All Answering the Same Question

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

I set the ten creators I love most side by side and realized they have all spent their lives answering one question, how a person should live when life hands him no ready made answer.

Here is the list, Beyond, Pu Shu, Wang Feng, Coldplay, Mu Xin, Milan Kundera, Yu Qiuyu, Victor Hugo, Naval Ravikant, and Nassim Taleb. Rock bands, novelists, essayists, a man who writes about money and happiness, a man who writes about risk. On one shelf, they look messy.

Start with Beyond. Wong Ka Kui once said something blunt, Hong Kong has no music scene, only an entertainment industry. Inside that industry he wrote a song for Nelson Mandela, Glorious Years, which opens with the bell ringing to call someone home. In May 1993 Beyond released Boundless Oceans Vast Skies, with the line “forgive me for a lifetime of loving freedom without restraint, I am also afraid that one day I will fall.” About a month later, taping a TV show in Tokyo, he fell from the stage. He was thirty one.

That brings Pu Shu and Wang Feng together, one shouts and one lets go. In Existence, Wang Feng asks it all in one breath, “who knows where we should go, who understands what life has become, do we find an excuse to keep scraping by, or spread our wings and stay angry,” his voice close to tearing. In In Spring he sings, “if one day I am old and have nothing to lean on, please leave me in that time.” Young Pu Shu sang Life Like Summer Flowers, “I am this dazzling instant, a flash of fire across the sky.” More than ten years later he sang The Ordinary Road for the film The Continent, “I once crossed mountains and seas, and walked through crowds of people,” and the song ends on “until I saw that ordinary is the only answer.”

Coldplay works the same way on me. In Yellow, Chris Martin makes you look up, “Look at the stars, look how they shine for you.” He wrote Fix You after Gwyneth Paltrow’s father died, the organ piling up layer by layer under “Lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones.” By Viva la Vida he is singing as a king who lost his crown, “I used to rule the world,” and then, “Now in the morning I sleep alone, sweep the streets I used to own.”

Yu Qiuyu and his Cultural Perplexity in Agony stayed with me for years. In The Taoist Pagoda he writes about Wang Yuanlu, a Taoist priest who looked after the Mogao Caves and sold the scrolls from the Library Cave to foreigners, cartload after cartload. Standing in front of the priest’s pagoda, Yu writes, “I hate this so much.” When he gets to Dujiangyan, his first move is to rank it above the Great Wall as the most stirring project in Chinese history. Li Bing built that weir more than two thousand years ago, and the water still runs through it today.

Mu Xin and Kundera belong on the same page. Locked up during the Cultural Revolution with no piano, Mu Xin drew a row of black and white keys on paper and played them every day in silence. In his fifties he moved to New York and spent five years lecturing a group of Chinese painters on world literature, lectures later collected as Memoirs on Literature. He wrote “the light of days used to move slowly, carts, horses, and letters were all slow, and a whole life was only enough to love one person,” and he wrote “I am a man in the dark with heavy snow falling all around.” In 2006 he went back to Wuzhen, and he died there in 2011. Kundera left Czechoslovakia for France in 1975 and was later stripped of his citizenship. The Unbearable Lightness of Being opens with Nietzsche’s eternal return. Tomas keeps repeating Beethoven’s “Es muss sein,” it must be, and the book sets against it a German saying, “Einmal ist keinmal,” what happens only once might as well not have happened at all. In 2019 the Czech Republic gave him his citizenship back. He was ninety.

Victor Hugo holds a heavy place in my heart. At the start of Notre Dame de Paris he says that in a dark corner of one of the cathedral’s towers he found a Greek word carved into the wall by hand, ἈΝÁΓΚΗ, fate. Quasimodo is the joke of all Paris, hunchbacked, one eyed, deafened by his own bells. He snatches Esmeralda from the gallows, carries her into the cathedral, lifts her over his head and shouts “Sanctuary!” After Frollo falls from the tower, Quasimodo looks out at Esmeralda hanging on the gibbet and says, “There is everything I ever loved!” At the end of the book, someone in the vault at Montfaucon finds two skeletons wrapped around each other. When they try to separate them, the bones crumble to dust.

Naval and Taleb look farthest from the rest, one talks about wealth and happiness, the other about black swans and antifragility. Naval says desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. He also says to seek wealth, not money or status. Taleb tells the story of the turkey, fed by the farmer for a thousand days, each day more sure that humans love it, until the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. In Antifragile he writes that wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.

So my little self introduction still holds, and it can grow longer now. If you like Beyond, if you like Pu Shu, if you like Mu Xin, if you like Milan Kundera, if you like Coldplay, if you like Yu Qiuyu and Victor Hugo, if you like Naval and Taleb, then we are friends.

Easter egg. While writing this I remembered Hyperion, which I read ten years ago. Dan Simmons writes a soldier, Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. In a military academy battle simulation he stands in the mud at Agincourt, the arrows have just stopped, and a woman walks out of the trees. No name, no past, and after that she shows up in one simulation after another. They become lovers at the edge of the battlefield. The October mud is still wet, a wounded horse is screaming somewhere off in the distance, and he still has his mail on. She reaches for the leather buckles and undoes them one at a time, her fingers cold. The woods are dark. All they can hear is each other breathing, and farther off, the voices of men clearing the field. Neither of them asks where the other came from. That is the part I love most. Much later, in front of the Time Tombs on Hyperion, she finally has a name, Moneta.

Moneta moves backward through time. As you read forward, they grow closer. For her, they are growing farther apart, and every meeting brings them nearer to goodbye.