Day One Reading Check-In: Notes on Appreciation of Fine Foreign Essays
Heinrich Böll’s “Anecdote on the Philosophy of Laziness” tells the story of a “tourist” who meets a fisherman at the harbor and tries to sell him his own doctrine of success. At first, in the tourist’s eyes, the fisherman is a poor man in shabby clothes. The fisherman seems lazy, unwilling to go out to sea and fish. So the tourist begins explaining to him the path of working hard, becoming rich, and finally attaining freedom. But the fisherman’s final sentence awakens the tourist: freedom is precisely what I already have now, and it is precisely you, the person telling me how to pursue freedom, who has broken my freedom.
After reading this essay, I thought: don’t we often become that “tourist” too? What we struggle so hard to seek is exactly what we abandon in the present. Whether freedom or happiness, it never seems to be found in all our restless searching. Instead, when we suddenly turn back, it is there where the lights are fading. We thought that by giving everything we had and casting everything aside, we would finally see that indescribable flame in our hearts. Little did we know that the flame was drifting farther and farther away, growing dimmer all the time.
“As long as I work hard for a while, I won’t have to work anymore later.” Do you remember? When we were young, we often wanted to make ourselves a plan: “I must retire at forty, and then properly enjoy life.” In the end, it becomes a whole life wasted. How ironic: we cannot enjoy even one minute, one hour, of the finest years of our lives, yet we fantasize about taking the second half of life seriously. No wonder that, in the end, when the tourist looks at the shabby fisherman, he can hardly conceal the envy in his heart.
This article was published on my blog, “Through Wise Eyes”:
https://blog.lazying.art