A Kind of Silent Murmur

There is no denying that ours is an age lacking in quiet. Ever since steel and concrete replaced brick and tile, and machines replaced farming, quiet has drifted farther and farther from our lives. We seem to have grown accustomed to clamor, to speed, and to the quiet and slowness of life leaving us hand in hand. All we hear, and all that accompanies us, is the roar of the times. So many things beyond our control make it hard for us to see ourselves clearly. After revisiting Wang Wei's Wangchuan Collection on several spring nights in a row, I suddenly felt that today Wang Wei may be a more important poet than any other. Through poetry, Wang Wei keeps showing us how to live alongside nature, and gives us reason to enter it. In the quiet that Wang Wei reveals, nature in its true form appears before us. Without nature's true form, there can be no true human nature. If humanity loses its true nature, it loses something precious in the soul.