In the darkness we meet

Author: Ni Zhanhe
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-06-01
Features: Several conversations were taking place in the room at the same time. The blue haze of cigarettes swirled and drifted, settling in the hair and fabric fibers, irritating the eyes and making everything under the light more blurred. The beer had grown less cold, while the night seeped in an ever-growing chill. The sounds of conversation gradually shifted from loud and high to low and soft, interspersed with longer and longer silences. Only desire, ambition, self-satisfaction, confusion, and fear continued to flow endlessly, unconsciously arranging, shaping, and determining the separate futures of everyone present. There had been someone among them who tried to etch indelible marks (gramme) on this fading youth, moments that exposed their bare existence. These moments were destined to be diluted and forgotten—this was something they dimly knew; thus, even in their moments of self-forgetfulness, they could not rid themselves of the resulting anxiety. When experience gave way to anticipation, when pure being was burdened by worries about the future, they began to leave the present, the ousia or leetant-present, drifting outside pure existence, procrastinating, dragging, and avoiding; while those foolishly attempting to cling to pure existence faced ruin, plunging into the peaks and valleys of the times, sinking into the bottomless abyss, or barely surviving. Yet the anxious ones remained anxious, even after pure existence had completely vanished beneath the layers of procrastination and concealment, they still remained anxious. The ever-widening distance from pure existence had turned this anxiety into despair, a hopeless despair: lacking self-pity, self-heroism, even a numb despair, a despair without even memories. Yet even this despair was like a symbol on the palm, by which one could trace the traces of having once been close to pure existence, and thereby confirm belonging and affinity, finding illusory companions in the despair, so as to be clearly distinguished from the ordinary mortals, just like Judas's kiss.