Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters

Earlier this year in my Honors 189 class we were assigned the task of reading Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters. It’s quite honestly the worst book I have ever read and it succeeded in making me more depressed than The Grapes of Wrath did. It is littered with confusingly introspective and hypocritical statements. Oddly enough, I did not gain a smidgen of appreciation for it until our class discussion regarding “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” One really frustrating attitude of Chuang Tzu was that life-- everything was pointless. Towards the tail end of the book, the narrator stated, “You mean you’re only now realizing there are no answers?” What that essentially amounted to was that I had completely wasted my time trying to understand what this book and condescending, dead man meant. I did not gain a better perception of it until the other day- when I thought about what I said in class. I may not understand every line in T.S. Elliot’s poem, and even if I didn’t make sense of any of it, the poem was ultimately still pleasurable because I simply like the way it sounds (The only problem with Chuang Tzu was that his prose sucked).

This can be applied, perhaps more easily, into music as well. Half the time I’m singing a song I don’t even sing the words right, but I don’t really care

I went to the author John Green’s book tour a few weeks ago, and his new book has a definite message. However, he spoke about how nervous and apprehensive he is about releasing his work. Not so much because he fears the quality of it, but because once the book is out there- it’s not his anymore. It’s the world’s to make of it what they will. I think that ultimately connects with Chuang Tzu’s statement that there are no answers because there is not just one person existing; there’s an incomputable number of humans with their own dialogue, creating their own