Staring into the dreamy Shanghai dusk, a few lines of verse cross my mind:
The candle died, the water-clock was exhausted,
I rose and sat, but could not be at peace.
Man’s affairs are like the flow of floodwater,
A life is just like floating in a dream.
A few years ago, an up-and-coming musician magically reenacted these poetic verses, when he was down and out in Shanghai. Many centuries ago, these lines were first uttered by the last emperor of the Southern Tang dynasty. He achieved greatness in his poems, not his reign.
Jorge Luis Borges said that the world is a book in which all men are being written. Is it true that we write the verses, or the verses write us? I believe the latter. For it could be said that a single, all-knowing master has written all the books in the world. Tonight, the emperor, the Shanghai musician and me are one.
Andy Yee 