Lin Yutang on the "Histrionic Instinct"

Consciously or unconsciously, we are all actors in this life playing to the audience in a part and style approved by them.


This histrionic talent, together with the related talent for imitation, which is a part of it, are the most outstanding traits of our simian inheritance. There are undoubted advantages to be derived from this showmanship, the most obvious being the plaudits of the audience. But then the greater the plaudits, the greater also are the flutterings of heart back stage. And it also helps one to make a living, so that no one is quite to blame for playing his part in a fashion approved by the gallery.


The only objection is that the actor may replace the man and take entire possession of him. There are a few select souls who can wear their reputation and a high position with a smile and remain their natural selves; they are the ones who know they are acting when they are acting, who do not share the artificial illusions of rank, title, property and wealth, and who accept these things with a tolerant smile when they come their way, but refuse to believe that they themselves are thereby different from ordinary human beings. It is this class of men, the truly great in spirit, who remain essentially simple in their personal lives. It is because they do not entertain these illusions that simplicity is always the mark of the truly great. Nothing shows more conclusively a small mind than a little government bureaucrat suffering from illusions of his own grandeur, or a social upstart displaying her jewels, or a half-baked writer imagining himself to belong to the company of the immortals and immediately becoming a less simple and less natural human being.


So deep is our histrionic instinct that we often forget that we have real lives to live off stage. And so we sweat and labor and go through life, living not for ourselves in accordance with our true instincts, but for the approval of society, like "old spinsters working with their needles to make wedding dresses for other women," as the Chinese saying goes.


Lin Yutang, from The Importance of Living

Lin Yutang "On Dreams"

Mr. Lin Yutang continues to amaze me. Here are some quotes from his book, The Importance of Living, in the chapter, "On Dreams."

"Perhaps all philosophy began with a sense of boredom. Anyway it is characteristic of humans to have a sad, vague and wistful longing for an ideal."

"The private dreams of being a corporal, the corporal dreams of being a captain, and the captain dreams of being a major or colonel."

"The world is therefore pretty much like an a la carte restaurant where everybody thinks the food the next table has ordered is so much more inviting and delicious than his own."

"Everybody wants to be somebody so long as that somebody is not himself."

"The greater the imaginative power of a man, the more perpetually he is dissatisfied."

"On the whole, humanity is as much led astray as led upwards by this capacity for idealism, but human progress without this imaginative gift is itself unthinkable."

"For I think we are constituted like a receiving set for ideas, as radio sets are equipped for receiving music from the air. Some sets with a finer response pick up the finer short waves which are lost to the other sets, and why, of course, that finer, more distant music is all the more precious if only because it is less easily perceivable."

"And so, out in an alley, up in an attic, or down in the barn or lying along the waterside, a child always dreams, and the dreams are real."

"Some of these children's dreams are clearer than others, and they have a force which compel their own realization; on the other hand, with growing age, those less clear dreams are forgotten, and we all live through life trying to tell those dreams of our childhood, and 'sometimes we die ere we find the language'."

"People fight for their dreams as much as they fight for their earthly possessions. And so dreams descend from the world of idle visions and enter the world of reality, and become a real force in our life."

"However vague they are, dreams have a way of concealing themselves and leave us no peace until they are translated into reality, like seeds germinating under ground, sure to sprout in their search for sunlight. Dreams are very real things."

From "On Dreams" in The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang
(bold mine)

Lin Yutang "On Having a Mind"

As some of you know, my current fascination is with the Chinese philosopher, Lin Yutang. Here are some insights from the chapter, "On Having a Mind", in his book The Importance of Living.

"All novels would be unreadable did we know exactly how the mind of each character was going to work and were we able consequently to predict the exact outcome. The reading of a novel is but the chase of a wayward and unpredictable mind making its incalculable decisions at certain moments, through a maze of evolving circumstances."

"The human mind is charming in its unreasonableness, its inveterate prejudices, and its waywardness and unpredictability."

"My conception of the human brain, as of all animal brains, is that it is like an octopus or a starfish with tentacles, tentacles for feeling the truth and eating it."

"We all labor under the misconception that the true function of the mind is thinking, a misconception that is bound to lead to serious mistakes in philosophy unless we revise our notion of the term 'thinking' itself."

"I prefer to have our mind charmingly unreasonable as it is at present. I should hate to see a world in which we are all perfectly rational beings. Do I distrust scientific progress? No, I distrust sainthood. Am I anti-intellectualistic? Perhaps yes; perhaps no. I am merely in love with life, and being in love with life, I distrust the intellect profoundly."

"But the very charm of biography, its very readability, depends on showing the human side of a great character which is so similar to ours. Every touch of irrational behavior in a biography is a stroke in convincing reality."

"I consider the education of our senses and our emotions rather more important than the eduction of our ideas."

Dreams, or Reality?

We use different words to explain things. But there are themes that persist in philosophy and literature. As a writer, I am curious about one theme in particular. It is a theme that haunts my writing and my life. It is a theme that can be found in Shakespeare, Cervantes, Borges, and the Chinese Classics . . . It is the theme of life as a dream. Reading Lin Yutang's magnificent work, The Importance of Living, I am brought to a new level of understanding about the human condition. He explains the dream-reality paradox much better than I can. There is no inherent conflict between the two; from the human point of view, we see conflict where there is none.

I'm talking about our suffering which, at times, feels so real. How can it be a dream? And yet, I pay close attention to my mind, and see how it wavers from one desire to another. This capricious, whimsical quality of the mind reveals the very essence of our dream-being. We perceive one thing with absolute solidity. We cling to it as truth. With only the passage of time to prove to us, that this solidity is not real, just like all the other things that came before and appeared to us as real, which were not.

Lin encourages us to adopt the attitude of comical detachment. He writes, "It is important that man dreams, but perhaps equally important that man can laugh at his own dreams." We can only become philosophers, he says, once we see the inherent comedy in this dream life. There is nothing that is ours, nothing that will stay, including us. Realizing the vanity of existence is the paved road to an understanding of human suffering. What is needed in the end--our antidote, per say--is a good laugh at ourselves and our highest struggles.

I am a victim of the competitive American mindset. To such a degree that I'm not competing with anyone but myself. I compete with myself because I hunger for greatness. And yet all it takes is for me to read a couple poems by Emily Dickinson, or a short story by Tolstoy, to see how far I have to go. In the words of Lin, we are "clever monkeys." He uses a colorful vocabulary to describe the human condition. Because we have minds, we are conceited. Beyond that, he sees something marvelous and liberating in the character of the "scamp". The human being is a scamp, he says.

I think of the character in my novel, my alter ego Lethe Bashar, as a scamp. The scamp has no home. The scamp is rebellious and independent. He wanders to find his food. He philosophizes on his condition. It seems we are all scamps in our own ways. We are truly liberated for not having a home. Neither the realm of the animals, nor the realm of the gods. Once we see the futility of our serious missions in life, the vanity of our self-improvement projects, only then we can embrace this foolish and wise character of ours.