I Am Happy in This World
Czesław Miłosz's life was a lifelong struggle against suffering. In June 1940, the 29-year-old Miłosz broke through four lines of defense held by Soviet and German forces and trekked from his native Vilnius to Nazi-occupied Warsaw. There he began an exile that would last half a century.
This writer, who survived by a hair the gunfire of World War II, described his own writing this way: "My twentieth century is made up of voices and faces of people I knew or heard of, who weighed on my heart and who no longer exist. Many people became famous for something and entered the encyclopedias, but many more were forgotten; all they can do is use me, use the rhythm of my blood, use the hand that holds the pen, to return among the living for a moment." When the Nobel Committee awarded him the Prize in Literature in 1980, the citation read: "Czesław Miłosz, with uncompromising clear-sightedness, has exposed the human condition in a world of violent conflict."
A life of suffering cannot break an optimistic person. Miłosz's short poem "Gift" is like a quietly flowing river, slowly telling of his love for life. Infinite past events have passed like fleeting clouds, and no pain can block his love for life; when he merges into nature, he is as calm and beautiful as everything around him.
Psychologists have found that the generation that came of age during World War II has a far lower rate of depression than the generation born in the postwar era of rapid economic growth. Miłosz's experience bears out a saying of the philosopher Schopenhauer: if a person focuses on the whole rather than on his own fate, his conduct will be more that of a wise man than of a sufferer. Amid the gunfire of World War II, Miłosz saw the fate of all humanity and pondered the future of humankind, and so he was able to rise above his individual suffering.
Czesław Miłosz reminds me of Professor Xu Zhuoyun, the Chinese master of history and sociology, who also crossed the ocean to study in America during the war years and then stayed in Pittsburgh to pursue fifty years of scholarship. He was disabled; because of straitened means, he sailed to the United States on a merchant ship carrying iron sand from the Philippines. Along the way he endured many hardships and dangers, taking fifty-seven days to reach America. En route he encountered a tsunami; the terrified crew tied him to a chair and tied the chair to the mast to protect him. Fortunately the captain was experienced, and he survived. Professor Xu was disabled, so from childhood he knew he need not compete or compare with others, and he resolved simply "to live inward."
When the Japanese invaded China, the young Xu Zhuoyun fled again and again along with everyone else; what he saw and heard on the road of flight gave him a deep compassion for the sufferings of ordinary people. After coming to America, he witnessed the country rise step by step to its zenith and then decline step by step from that zenith, and saw the ups and downs of immigrants from all over the world. All this left a deep impression on the professor of history and sociology. His thought reaches back a thousand years and spans past and present; what he thinks about is the social problem of finding a way to settle body and mind for countless ordinary people. He has long since dismissed his own disability and the sufferings of his life as lighter than a feather; he is infinitely content with his own life, and what flows from his pen is his concern for the future of humanity.
The life of Sakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism, was much the same. By today's medical standards, the young Sakyamuni would be a patient with major depressive disorder, and a psychiatrist might well have prescribed antidepressants. But Sakyamuni laid down his princely status, went into the forest, and meditated for more than a decade, hoping to escape the spiritual anguish that tormented him. What finally led him truly out of that pain and turned him into a joyful spiritual teacher was the truths he awakened to. These truths were not about Sakyamuni's "small self"; rather, they were universal problems he saw in the domain of human body and mind—he set out to find a way to liberate humanity from spiritual suffering. In Buddhist terms, he moved from the Hinayana path to the Mahayana path; a self-liberated man became a bodhisattva who saves all beings, and in this process he finally cast off all afflictions.
After we deeply understand the various sufferings endured by humankind across the ages, we will realize that everything we personally endure is part of the inescapable laws of nature and society. If we are willing to take one more step forward, we should, like our ancestors, strive to do something to free those who come after us from the sufferings we once endured.
When a person understands this truth, he will no longer harbor extravagant demands on life. Life is a gift nature has given us; merely to be alive is already a great happiness. We will marvel at every day we live; every landscape we see, every patch of earth we touch, can make us happy from the heart. The fragrance of a single flower is enough to intoxicate us; a single butterfly passing by can delight us.