渴望孤独没有什么不好的。
Today I want to talk with you about why loneliness is so beautiful—but really, I’m using the occasion to run a little book-selling ad.
What book am I selling? My own old book, The Alluring Illusion: Secrets of Psychology in Film. It came out a few years ago and has been out of print for quite a while. Not long ago, the editor of my book messaged me to say that he had just managed to get a reprint approved. It’s now back on sale at Dangdang and Dangdang’s Tmall flagship store, and he wants to use this chance to push its sales up to the industry’s recognized “bestseller” level. So I’ve excerpted and adapted a small section from the book.
The rest of the book is similar in form to today’s excerpt: it uses elements from movies to talk about psychology, always coming back to the human mind. If you find this reasonably interesting, why not pick up a copy while the Double Eleven discounts are on—or recommend it to a friend.
I’m rather embarrassed. I poured everything I had into writing this book, and after selling it for years, it still somehow hasn’t reached the standard for a bestseller. I suppose it really is my destiny: critically acclaimed, commercially ignored.
The book was once selected by Douban Reading for its annual film-books list, although the Douban editors put it in the wrong category—it’s actually a popular psychology book, but they treated it as a film book. Still, it does show that its quality was recognized. The editor who messaged me the other day once again expressed his lingering frustration, feeling that the book had been seriously undervalued. Well, the two of us have been nursing that frustration for years.
But enough of the preamble. Let’s turn to a little passage from the book: the beauty of loneliness.
I first thought of writing about this theme because the word “loneliness” usually isn’t a good word in everyday life—and, in fact, it probably shouldn’t be. People who feel lonely for a long time see both their mental and physical health deteriorate, and may even live shorter lives. But what I wondered was this: if loneliness is bad, why is it that films and television so often manage to create a certain beauty through an atmosphere of loneliness?
The answer first surfaced for me in Ang Lee’s film Lust, Caution. Lust, Caution is practically an old movie now, but it’s such a classic that if I mention Wang Jiazhi and Mr. Yee, Tang Wei and Tony Leung, or those three deleted sex scenes, plenty of its images will surely leap back into your mind at once.
So let me ask you: which scene from Lust, Caution left the deepest impression on you? Maybe it was those three sex scenes. Maybe it was Wang Jiazhi saying “Go” after seeing the enormous diamond ring, as big as a pigeon’s egg.
The scene that stayed with me most was Wang Jiazhi singing “Tianya Genu” for Mr. Yee.
In the “Tianya Genu” scene, Mr. Yee senses that Japan will eventually lose the war, and that as a traitor he will never meet a good end. Wang Jiazhi also senses that, as this so-called agent, she is ultimately just a pawn in someone else’s hands; whether or not she kills the major traitor in front of her, she too is certain not to survive happily ever after. And so these two equally desperate people are bound tightly together by a song, “Tianya Genu.”
In Wang Jiazhi’s eyes, the enemy she intends to assassinate is somehow the only person in the world who shares her suffering and whose fate is bound to hers. In Mr. Yee’s eyes, everyone in the world must be guarded against, and yet his mistress is somehow the only person who truly understands him.
Little sister is like thread, young man like a needle; once stitched together, we’ll never part.” After that line, Mr. Yee completely let go of the last tiny bit of suspicion he had toward Wang Jiazhi—and Wang Jiazhi could no longer kill Mr. Yee.
If there was love between Wang Jiazhi and Mr. Yee—and, as a matter of fact, there was—then their love was born in this scene. They came to know, pity, and love each other in despair because both finally realized that they were being exiled by the entire world. What allowed love to bloom was an overwhelming sense of loneliness.
Once I had that little insight, I thought back and realized that almost all the love stories on movie screens that have moved me are a form of love of the lonely.
Before Wall-E in WALL-E dances through space with Eve, he first has to endure a century of loneliness. If Li Xiaojun and Li Qiao in Comrades: Almost a Love Story had not experienced that loneliness while making their way in a foreign land, they would have done nothing more than pass each other in a crowd. In Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels, Michelle Reis sits behind Takeshi Kaneshiro on his motorcycle and says, “That minute was so warm.” But only “that minute” between two marginal people could be so warm.
One of the films that has influenced me most, A Chinese Ghost Story, starring Leslie Cheung and Joey Wong, is the same. It too is a story of love of the lonely.
Leslie Cheung’s Ning Caichen clings to a childlike heart while barely surviving in a chaotic age, exiled to the margins of human society by his own kindness and innocence. Joey Wong’s Nie Xiaoqian holds on alone to her conscience amid the murderous nature of every demon around her. A man and a woman, one human and one ghost: both are solitary souls exiled to the edge of the human world, each facing the wasteland within.
I’ve realized that almost all the love stories I like are like this. In each, at least one protagonist is a fellow sufferer adrift at the edge of the world. Before love begins, their hearts are desolate. Then love is a little flower blooming in that desert. Precisely because it blooms in a desert, it shines so brightly. What makes love so gripping isn’t love itself, but the desolate backdrop that sets it off.
I suppose that’s probably the first reason loneliness can be beautiful: love is humanity’s eternal theme, love is beautiful, and loneliness seems forever to follow love like a shadow.
Love belongs to the lonely. But why? Why are the most unforgettable love stories always love of the lonely?
Is it because people crave love especially when they’re lonely?
Not necessarily.
The psychologist Stanley Schachter conducted a fascinating experiment. After a group of volunteers entered a laboratory, a staff member in a white coat told them they were about to receive electric shocks. The volunteers were divided into two groups. The first group saw a large, frightening-looking shock machine.
The staff member told them that, to make the experimental results genuinely useful, the shock intensity had to be set fairly high. It would cause considerable pain, but no permanent damage. When the other group entered the lab, they saw a simple, compact machine. The staff member described the experiment in a breezy tone, saying the shocks would be very mild and cause only slight discomfort.
That induced fear and anxiety in the first group, while the second group experienced a relatively mild, low-anxiety state.
Then the staff told the volunteers that the experiment would be delayed for ten minutes. They could wait alone in a room, or wait together with the other volunteers.
Of course, the “electric shocks” in this experiment were all a bluff. What the researchers really wanted to know was whether the “anxious” group or the “non-anxious” group would be more likely to choose to wait together.
The result was that many more volunteers in the anxious group chose to wait together than in the non-anxious group. Anxiety magnified loneliness and made people more willing to seek company. That’s why people often say that people in pain won’t turn down love—though of course they won’t turn down friendship or family affection either.
But what if we look at the result from the other direction? The lonely but non-anxious group didn’t actually have any particular desire to be with other people.
So what pushes people toward love isn’t loneliness itself, but loneliness that makes them feel bad.
Put that way, loneliness still doesn’t sound like a good thing. It’s only because its unpleasantness can call love forth that it becomes indirectly linked with beauty.
But is that the whole answer to why loneliness is beautiful?
Of course not.
In his book Six Lectures on Solitude, Jiang Xun says: “Loneliness and solitude are different. Loneliness makes you panic; solitude is fullness.”
What gives birth to love isn’t loneliness, but loneliness that has turned into desolation.
The kind of loneliness we fear is loneliness that has become desolation. Yet there is another kind of loneliness we actually long for.
Why do we long for solitude?
Because there is freedom in it.
Human beings are social animals, of course, and can’t do without all kinds of social relationships. But social relationships can also be a burden—a burden we sometimes want to escape.
I recently heard a term called “the pleasure of staying up late.” Some people like to stay awake deep into the night, sitting alone. They enjoy being night owls simply because they like the feeling of being cut off from the world when everything is quiet and still.
Maybe only when you’re alone late at night are you no one’s husband, no one’s son, no one’s father. You are simply yourself. Only then are you free. The pleasure doesn’t come from staying up late; it comes from freedom.
Escaping the constraints of social relationships isn’t easy for anyone, but it may be especially difficult for us. Our culture places such strong emphasis on human connectedness. Ever since I was little, people have told me I don’t fit in. In some cultures, that might be called being an individualist, nothing too serious. Here, it’s considered a massive character flaw. Our cultural tradition doesn’t allow us to be lonely.
A cross-cultural study illustrates this very well. It found that when American volunteers saw the word “I” and words for social relationships connected to them, such as “my mother,” two different brain regions were activated. But when Chinese volunteers saw “I” and “my mother,” the same brain region was activated. Kind of tragic, when you think about it: a culture that doesn’t allow solitude has already been stamped into our brains. Even when our bodies are sitting alone, our minds remain forever entangled with those social relationships—there’s always some of you inside me, and we can’t be separated.
Maybe the less attainable something is, the more we long for it. I don’t know whether I’m psychologically compensating for how difficult solitude is in real life, but I especially love scenes in movies where people are alone in places where being alone should be impossible. I love watching Will Smith wander Manhattan’s deserted streets with a dog in I Am Legend. I love watching the male lead of 28 Days Later stroll through the deserted center of London. I love watching Tom Cruise sprint across an empty Times Square in Vanilla Sky.
That may be why I love zombie movies so much: a world destroyed by zombies is always so open and empty that it fills me with delight. It’s lonely, yes, but it’s free too.
Why is loneliness beautiful? Because solitude is a kind of freedom, and freedom is a beautiful longing. That’s the second answer I’ve found.
Jiang Xun says: “There’s nothing wrong with solitude. What makes solitude bad is being afraid of it.”
What I want to say is that there’s nothing wrong with being afraid of solitude either. Human beings do have to depend on a group to survive, and much of the time, we’re perfectly happy to live that way;
But as Mr. Jiang Xun said, there’s nothing wrong with wanting solitude, because sometimes solitude really is beautiful.
That’s where we’ll leave this little discussion of the beauty of solitude. I adapted this topic from a short chapter of my book The Charming Illusion. If you enjoyed it, search for “The Charming Illusion” or my name, Zhichao Wei, on Dangdang or Tmall to find the book.
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