The 1st day

The 1st day of my self-employed, jobless, idleness, whatever, time will tell. A friend suggests that I should talk more about Chinese Classical Literature. But my books about Chinese Classical Literature is in my home in Malaysia, not here. I would like to have my books with me, I only can think about this once my visa settled, the books come to me; if not, I come to the books. I am not sure about how trustworthy are the resources on internet. I appreciate if my Chinese Literature friends can advice me on this.

Also, since year 2009 I graduated from Peking University, I did not practice Chinese classical literature seriously anymore. It is just like music, without practice, it would not be remaining in my brain. However, exactly because of I had abandoned it for decade, now is the time to come back to them. Action is louder than words, let’s just start.

Poem for today I pick “Stork Tower” by Wang Zhihuan (688–742). The poem is describing a view that the poet saw from the Stork Tower as the sun was setting. The German translation says “red sun” , original text is “white sun”. I think the color of the sun is rather a minor issue, the main thing is the sun was disappearing among the mountain, the sun was setting. This was the view when the poet looked forward. When the poet look down from the tower, he saw the Yellow River ran into sea. This is the first sentence, he wrote about the scenery he saw.

The second sentence is his philosophy, his reflection on climbing the tower. If I want to satisfy the hunger of my eyes for thousand miles, I should just climb higher to stand on a higher ground.

That’s a little poem with big ambition. You might curious about what have I done today? Cleaning up, decluttering my mind, grocery shopping, and reading.

This morning during the breakfast, I was enjoying reading a book, so enjoyable that I made a video to remember the joy of reading. I posted the video on Instagram Reel, I was and am still happy that the author and the publisher shared my reel on their story. If you have not follow me on Instagram, I would be happy to see you there.

Some of you told me that you never see my post or reel shown on your Instagram even though you’re following me. This is because of the annoying algorithm, and my account is a small account. If you’re following let’s say 200 accounts, 20 of them are celebrities, you will only see their updates rather than mine. It might be helpful if you interact with my post, story or reel, to let the algorithm detect that you are interested in seeing my update, may be my post will show up automatically. All in all, I don’t know. Just see the picture below to decide if you want to click on them or not.

It was a very beautiful day, the 1st day of self-employed, jobless, idleness, whatever. Music of tonight, is the music I use for my “Reading Reel”: Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 2nd movement, interpreted by Martha Argerich and Claudio Abbado. Good night!