Xiaolu Guo - A Concise Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers

Today I read about tense again. It is a sentence from Ibn Arabi, an old sage, a very wise man living in the early thirteenth century. He said:

The Universe continues to be in the present tense.

Does that mean English tense difference is just complicated for no reason? Does that mean tenses are not natural things at all? Does that mean love is a form that continues for ever and for ever, just like in my Chinese concept?

About time , what I really learned from studying English is: time is different with timing .

I understand the difference of these two words so well. I understand falling in love with the right person in the wrong timing could be the greatest sadness in a person’s entire life.

You had all this of beautiful energy inside when I first met you in the cinema. But things have changed. All our fight, all your strugglings with London, all of that has made you look like a small dried fig fell from the tree.

In our garden, in the last several days, figs fall from the tree, the fruit tree without flowers. They didn’t grow or ripen during the summer, but they can’t go through winter either. They are tiny, immature, greenish, and shrinking like an old man without a happy youth. Those figs are full of small wrinkles on the skin. They look very sad. In the morning, you walk to the garden, pick up those figs from the soil, and your palms are full of dirt and pity.

I remember those days when we first met. Then, the figs grew lively. I remember you once opened a big soft fig to show me the seeds inside. It was pink and delicate inside, and you would let me suck those sweet juice…Now it is winter, the time of dying, our hard time.

You see those tiny figs drop from the tree to the dirt, and you pick up them one by one. You come back to the kitchen and put these tiny green round things on the table, the table which we use for chopping vegetables, the table you always read newspapers, and the table which I use to study English and do my homework every night.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve…There are seventeen tiny figs on the kitchen table now. They are quiet, obscure, plain, and anonymous. They want say something to me, but eventually they are tired. They are dried up by the seasons, just like you.

I see your beauty is being diminished, by me. Day by day. Night by night.

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contradiction n. 1. a combination of statements, ideas, or features which are opposed to one another; 2. the statement of a position opposite to one already made.

You always live in the middle of two realities. You want to be able to make the art work, but at the same time you don’t value it. You want to be away from London, to settle down in a pure and natural place, with mountain and sea, but at the same time you are obsessed to communicate with the society.

Sometimes, we go out for a walk. We walk in the Victoria Park, or we will walk from Broadway Market Street through London Fields. Your pale face is hidden in your old brown leather jacket, and your cheeks tell the pains with no name.

Sometimes I can’t help to kiss you, to soften you, to cheer you up. You walk slower than before, slow just like we are a real old aged couple. You are struggling with yourself.

“Do you want to come to China with me?” Again, I invite you. And for the last time, I invite you.

You stop walking and look at me. “Yes. But I don’t know if I want to travel anymore. I need to stop drifting .”

London Fields is in yellow grey. The maple trees are naked. No more children playing around. I wonder if I will be able to see this grass again, coming out in the next spring.

In Hackney Town Hall Library we sit and look at books.

Gustave Flaubert said, “In Pericles’s time, the Greeks devoted themselves to art without knowing where the next day’s bread might come from. Let us be Greeks!”

I close the Flaubert book, looking at you. You are reading a book with the picture of sculptures. I keep thinking about Flaubert’s words: artists should devote themself to the art, like a priest devote to God. But what is so important about art? Why it should be like a devotion?

“How come art can be more important than food?” I ask you in a little voice.

“I agree with you, actually.” You close up sculpture book. “I don’t think art is so important. But art is fashionable in the West. Everybody wants to be an artist. Artists are like models. That’s why I hate it.”

You put the book back on shelf.

“But,” I protest, “you are like a Chinese saying: piercing your shield with your spear . You are contradicting with yourself. You are making art too. So it means art is also a need, a necessary of expression.”

“Yes, but if I had better things to do I would give up making art. I would rather do something more solid.”

I’m confused.

I’d like to dedicate my life to do something serious, maybe things like writing, or painting, but definitely not making shoes. I don’t care what you said about artists. I’d like to write about you, one day. I’d like to write about this country. People say one should separate one’s real life from one’s art work, and one should protect his real life from his fiction life. So one can has less pain, and be able to see the world soberly. But I think it is a very selfish attitude. I like what Flaubert said about Greeks. If you are a real artist, everything in your life is part of your art. The art is a memorial of the life. Art is the abstract way of his daily existence.

Again the Buddhist in my grandmother’s voice tells me: “The reality that surrounds us is not real. It is the illusion of life.”

fatalism n. the belief that all events are predetermined and people are powerless to change their destinies.

A film called Saturday Night and Sunday Morning , directed by Karel Reisz at 1960s. This is the last film we will see together. This is the last film I will see in London.

The beautiful young man in the film, played by Albert Finney. He is too beautiful for a humble working-class life. He is wild, he wants to play and to have fun. But of course he is also a trouble maker. He gets bored by having an affair with a married woman, and he doesn’t want to take any responsibility. So he starts to chase young girls. But after a while he is bored again with one young girl, she means nothing to him except for her brief beauty. Womans don’t weigh anything in his restless heart. He is bored of physical work, and of unimaginative youth. He becomes frustrated because he gains nothing from searching for the excitements of life. His beauty decays. His youthful energy fades away by the end of the film.

Is your life a bit like him? Have you felt the same way as that young man felt about womans or family? I gaze at your back, your brown hair and your brown leather jacket. We walk along the night street in South Kensington. Again, how familiar, this is the place we first met. It has been one year.

We stop in front of a little corner shop to buy some samosa. The shop is about to close.

“So you don’t think he can love that married woman?” I ask.

I am still living in the film.