"The Pleasures of a Nonconformist"

[fiefoe]

More of Mr. Lin's opinions:

<Towards the modernists, the pessimists, nihilists, existentialists, or "beat" poets>: We seem to have lost something, the freshness and tintinnabulations and intimations of immortality - of a Wordsworth... Peace and confidence and belief in the restorative powers of nature were still possible... We still had the mild pantheism of Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning, the airy optimism of Tennyson, the strident call for work and courage of Thomas Carlyle, the transcendental glory of man and his own conscience in Emerson, the call to independence and of nature in Thoreau. .. In that era the House of Victoria had not yet collapsed. Girls still had Victorian names like Prudence, Patience, and Faith.

<Towards the materialistic age>:  I would not call the present age an age of despair, but rather an age of confusion, of unsettled values and shaken beliefs. We know too many things, and are sure of too few things. It is surely a comment on this present world that everybody is talking about the one word "security".

<On his adored English>:  In the last century the English have always fought the right war, on the right side, at the right time, and called it by a wrong name. ... You cannot help having a feeling of tremendous admiration of this nation for its pluck, for its healthy instinct of danger.

<On theology>:  First we use words to describe a poetic truth, then we take our own words literally.

<On the Chinese character>:  (It) can be summed up under the term 'mellowness'. 
    The spirit of human reasonableness is a most important teaching of Chinese humanism. Was it Aristotle who said that man is a reasoning, but not a reasonable being? Chinese philosophy admits this, but ... this Chinese spirit of reasonableness ... is compounded of two elements, "human nature" and "logical reason".
    An undesirable effect of (this) and its consequent hatred of logical extremes has been that the Chinese as a race are unable to have any faith in system.
    The essence of the reasonable spirit is a sort of "live and let live" philosophy, so well typified in Portia's appeal that justice be tempered with mercy.