All Things Bright And Beautiful
In high school, my homeroom teacher Lao Gao said he looked down most on people who keep pet dogs, because they can’t find satisfaction in real life, so they need a loyal dog wagging its tail and begging for pity to soothe their vanity. I neither agreed nor disagreed with this view. Besides the guard dog we kept at our old home—the most common native dog, scientifically called the Chinese Pastoral Dog—almost no one in my life kept dogs as pets, so agonizing over the purpose of keeping dogs was meaningless to me.
These days I’ve been reading James Herriot’s All Things Bright And Beautiful. This book was recommended to me by Roy (dearroy.com) in January this year. I bought it in February, and now it’s May—I finally finished reading it completely. The beginning wasn’t easy to get into; it took me two months to enter the story. I have to admit I’m very slow to warm up. A few days ago the power suddenly went out at noon. With nothing to do, I pulled out this book with a bookmark in the middle and continued reading. Certain emotions, after a long time, finally become fervent. I came to like this book. I read all the way until Harry enlisted, and the story ended. I think a person who loves life and loves living so much will have new stories wherever he goes.
From the opening The Birth of a Lamb to the penultimate story The Old Man and the Dog, the 38 stories are nothing more than accounts of veterinarian Harry treating animals for the villagers of Darrowby—pigs, dogs, cats, cows, birds, sheep, horses, even a person. But in these ordinary rural lives, Harry can write what looks to us like monotonous life in a witty, humorous, engaging way. This is precisely “all things bright and beautiful.” A person without Harry’s optimistic, positive, and humorous attitude toward life—like me—might never discover the beauty of life. Add this book to the list of healing songs, cute girls, handsome boys, and pictures. At least it will make people understand a truth that’s been clichéd by middle school Chinese classes. Kawabata Yasunari explained in The Unwept Flower that “life is not lacking in beauty, but lacking eyes that discover beauty.” I say life is so boring—every day you have to eat, go to work, go to class, sleep; every day face the same people you see every day, hear the same truths, log into the same websites, read similar tragedies in society, watch similar moods… I’m going crazy, I want to escape this madhouse without walls. Of course many people have the same thoughts as me, but their stories aren’t my story. I counsel them with my second personality: “Life itself is like this.” Now I must say I was wrong. Life isn’t like this—it’s just that we’re not enthusiastic enough. Life is originally a shy little girl; a little teasing and she can be infinitely charming.
When reading 1988: I Want to Talk to the World, when Lu Ziye and a woman traveled together on National Highway 318, from an aesthetic point of view, the image of Harry driving on a Yorkshire farm with a dog named Sam is a bit prettier. But the prettier it is, the lonelier its meaning. So Lu Ziye and the woman had endless stories driving all the way, while Harry could only discover the hidden beauty in life during house calls on the road—the valleys, the morning sun, the waterside—all worth stopping for, stealing moments of leisure in floating life. With beauty existing in repetitive life, everything becomes lively. The ordinary stories in the book often make me burst out laughing.
When Harry deals with animals, he never has an attitude of “just getting the job done.” A person who loves animals must have a very soft heart; his life must be beautiful; he must also be beneficial and harmless to society. Even when Harry joined the Royal Air Force, he certainly wasn’t going to kill people.
I also want to drive an off-road vehicle alone, with a German Shepherd, to some place.
Errata: Thanks to classmate Guo Zheng Zhi Yu (edwardguo.com) for correcting: “Life is not lacking in beauty, but lacking eyes that discover beauty.” This sentence was said by French sculptor Rodin; Kawabata Yasunari’s original words were: “The beauty that humans perceive is limited. Precisely because humans’ ability to perceive beauty is limited, the beauty humans perceive is limited, while nature’s beauty is infinite.”