作为一个词语“,活着”在我们中国的语言里充满了力量,它的力量不是来自于喊叫,也不是来自于进攻,而是忍受,去忍受生命赋予我们的责任,去忍受现实给予我们的幸福和苦难、无聊和平庸。

This is from the preface to YU HUA’s “To Live”, and was written by the author himself. The gist of it is that “to live” is not something you shout out, or something that is aggressive, outwardly defined, but rather means to suffer and persist through both the happiness, pain, joy and grief, boredom, mediocrity and everything that life inevitably brings.

I don’t think that off the cuff translation really works, and i don’t think that the point is especially profound but it’s eloquent and that makes it worth sharing

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This is from a paper I found on the web, on subjectivity and mathematics education, perhaps prompted by my recent return to teaching calculus, however briefly, which has reawakened my interest in the subject. Especially now, when I realize that i am not really, passionately interested in most of what happens in the world, in the things that people take interest in. The stuff we talk about: music, movies, sports, politics, tech, food–you see all of that in our conversations everyday, and yet what i think about is what is NOT included on the list. I mean most of what we talk about has its root in mass culture, as opposed to elite artistic or intellectual culture. There’s nothing wrong with that, but sometimes i step back at this and think “you know what, i just dont want to be a part of this anymore. And then, inevitably, i think of being atop a hill, with a glimpse, from between the hills, of the Mediterranean. and i think about a simple life, and i think about a life free from working for the Man, that is, i think of what life could be like if i didn’t have to sell my soul to corporate capitalism or pay attention to its creations and cultural artifacts. Because capitalism’s greatest achievement is not the particular objects but how it’s won hearts and minds, molded us in the shape of the consumers that they dream of seeing, turning us into the market that will make them rich. In any case, this creeping sense of alienation has made me think more and more about what it is that constitutes the self, the sense of who you are, the feeling of belongingness or estrangement from one’s cultural world. and so i read this passage and thought it was interesting:

Self has often been understood as the biological entity held together by a cognitive
unity, but as Lemke (1995, p. 82) argues, from a “post-modern view this was a massive
sleight of hand. Even within the natural sciences there is no guarantee that physical, chemical and biological definitions of an organism coincide for all purposes”. Subjectivity is constituted discursively, defined by participations in a multitude of discursive practices. As such subjects identify with something outside of their selves. They identify with and partake in social discourses and through these identifications craft their subjectivity. Although possessiveness of one’s subjectivity is also in question since subjects are acting out aspects of previously formed languages, trying them out for size, but never quite fitting (Althusser, 1971). As such subjects are “alienated” from their discourse.

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These are some excerpts that I translated from the original article in Chinese.

人物周刊：现在有一个现象，就是在城郊结合部农村集体所有制的土地上，建起了很多村民建的房，一租30年，相当于商品房。许多城里人因为买不起城里的房子，会向那边流动，把外来务工者可以租住的农民房的价格又抬高了。

秦晖：对，这个是国际上贫民住房的一个非常重要的问题。实际上政府也没有驱赶穷人，但是贫民区住的人多，价格抬高，穷人住不起就都走掉了。这是市场经济带来的问题，我觉得还是要靠国家福利来解决。

NFZK: Recently there’s been a phenomenon of city people moving outwards towards the countryside, living in homes that were intended for migrant workers and peasants, raising the prices of real estate there.

Qin Hui: Yes, this is a very important international issue. It’s not that the governments are trying to drive out the poor, but when there are increasing numbers of people living in these areas, prices climb and poor people can no longer afford to live there. This is a problem that arises in a market economy, and I believe that only a social welfare system can address it.

人物周刊：您发出声音的主要对象是谁？是政府，还是大的利益集团比如房产商们？

秦晖：我的意见本质上就是约束政府权力，要政府承担责任，必须给这些进城的人解决住房。如果有能力就给他们盖廉租房，暂时没有能力至少不能撵他们走。

NFZK: Your opinions and analysis–for whose ears are they meant? Is it the government or special interest groups such as real estate developers?

Qin Hui: My opinions boil down to checks and balances on the power of the government, I want them to take the responsibility and solve the issue of housing for the urban poor and migrant workers. If they have the wherewithal, build some cheap housing, and if not, at least don’t try to drive them away.

人物周刊：作为一个城里人，您不害怕城市变得乱糟糟吗？

秦晖：当然害怕。但我们不能以这个为理由剥夺农民的权利。乱糟糟的状况，当然是要解决的，而且世界各国的贫民社区发展史已经表明，这方面有了很大进步，哈莱姆的治安就比以前好很多，它就在哥伦比亚大学旁边，八九十年代去哥大的中国学者住哈莱姆的大有人在，所以我不同意温铁军的一句话，“中国学者一到国外就都是周旋于上流社会，从来没有人去关心贫民窟。”另外他转了一圈发现贫民窟比较恐怖，所以得出的结论和南非白人政权是一样的：必须不准穷人在城里住……新农村建设如果按这个思路搞就和南非一样啊，南非搞的黑人家园就是这种制度：黑人可以在城里打工，但不要在城里安家，打工到三十几岁就该回去了。

NFZK: As a city dweller, are you afraid that the cities are going to become dangerous or experience a breakdown in social order:

Qin Hui: Of course I have those fears. But I don’t believe this is a good reason to deprive other people of their rights. This lack of order is of course something that we have to work on, and the history of slums in other countries indicates that progress can be made; consider Harlem, which is much better than before and is right next to Columbia University. The Chinese scholars that went to Columbia in the 1980s and 90s often set foot in Harlem, so I don’t agree with that Wen Tiejun said about “as soon as Chinese scholars go abroad, they only mingle with the upper crust and never care about what happens in the slums.” On the other hand, he went out to the slums and thought they were scary, and so reached a conclusion similar to that of the South African apartheid government: we can’t let poor people live in the cities…the new construction and development in the village, if it goes down that track, will end up being just like South Africa of that era, when you had Bantustans: the blacks could enter the city to work, but not live there, and after working until their 30s were told to go back to their homes.

人物周刊：这里要打个问号，他们真的好起来了吗？原来在村里一年挣几百块，进了城打工一个月就有500块，“比在老家强多了”。其实很多人在城里谋生，心里是有创伤的，但他怀着希望，要往上游走，因为整个大环境都把这个价值判断塞给他：城里一定是比农村好的。

秦晖：对，你的问号我很赞同。但这里有两个层次的问题：第一，我们所谓的好与不好以什么人的感受为依据？只能以他的感受为依据。只要这个人是健康的、没丧失理智的，那么他就是具有判断力的，这个健康不是指文化上的，若说由于文化素质差而不懂什么是好，这样讲就太不人道了，等于剥夺了穷人的选择权。

第二个层次是，他做出某种价值判断实际上隐含有某种被迫的成分，但是这种成分他没有说出来。比如有人说他进城了，尽管生活很糟糕，一大堆人挤大通铺，妻子儿女留在老家，没有家庭生活，但还是觉得好，起码比原来在农村受苦要好——他实际上有一个预期，虽然这个预期可能是虚幻的，是达不到的。

这时候有两个选择：一是因为认定他的预期是达不到的，就干脆取消他的预期，把他赶走；二是我们来分析为什么他的预期达不到。

一种可能是预期太高：他要当总统、要当大富翁，这是做不到的；另一种可能是在城里不存在公平竞争，哪怕蓝领行业的公平竞争都没有，很多行业他们是不被准入的，那就不能说他这个预期是不合理的；第三种连预期都谈不上，而是本来完全可以做到的、顺其自然的事情，由于人为的阻隔，无法实现。

比如，有些人在城里处在类似打黑工的状态，只能住工棚，没有正常的家庭生活，但他觉得挣点钱寄回家去盖房子也是好的——其实很多进城打工的人没有在城里常住的预期，他们所谓的希望就是35岁以前住工棚，35岁以后回家——如果我们想给他们指出某种希望，不是恰恰要维护他们有在贫民窟生活的权利吗？

NFZK: I think we have to raise a question here–are they really better off in the city? Before, in the villages, it would take them an entire year to earn a few hundred yuan, and now in the cities they can make 500 in a month, which is “much better than at home.” However, in some sense coming to the cities to work is quite damaging, because they come here with hopes of upward mobility, because the entire environment is feeding them these values: cities are naturally better than the countryside.

Qin Hui: Right, I agree with that. But this questions has two levels. Firstly, upon what basis do you judge what is good and bad? We can only rely on their subjective feelings. If a person is healthy and mentally stable, we can assume that they still have the ability to make such judgments, and by healthy I don’t mean educated or cultured, because if we are going to say that they don’t really understand things because they aren’t educated, well, that would just be too unfair and would be tantamount to depriving them of their right to choose.

On another level, if these value judgments are somehow based on things beyond their control, they do not always tell you so. For example, these workers come into the city, and even though their lives are difficult, with everyone crammed together, sleeping on the floor, their wives and children at home and therefore no semblance of family life, they still think it’s good, because at least it’s better than what they would have to endure at home–they actually have expectations, even though these expectations can be somewhat illusory and therefore cannot be reached.

At this point, they are confronted with two choices: one, because they are unable to meet their own expectations, they just forgo these expectations and the other is that we attempt to analyze why their expectations were not met.

One possibility is that their expectations were too high: they want to become president, they want to become rich, these are just impossible. The other possibility is that they are faced with unfair competition, because even some blue collar jobs aren’t level playing fields, in fact they are practically barred from various professions, in which case you cannot say that their expectations are not rational. The third possibility is that there was nothing inherently wrong with the level of their expectations, but because of human obstacles they are somehow unable to realize their goals.

For example, some of the people that come to the cities are working “underground”, so they can only stay in makeshift homes, and don’t have normal family lives, but they feel that remitting money home to build a house is something good–in fact, many of the migrant workers don’t harbor hopes of long-term residence in the city, they just think that before they are 35, they can live in those makeshift dorms and after they turn 35, go home–and if we really want to give them something to hope for, don’t we have to begin by safeguarding their rights in these slums?

人物周刊：户籍也好，违章建筑也好，这一道道的门槛其实是阻碍农村人向城市流动，虽然现在有几亿大军在流动。

秦晖：对啊，实质是剥夺贫民的权利。比如，违章建筑的概念实际上是非常任意的，如果非常明确地规定什么建筑是违章，什么是不违章，而且严格执行，那很可能把城里人也给赶走了。但城里人你是不可能把他赶走的，因为他有城市户口，哪怕他住在狗窝里也不能赶他走，所以这个制度就有了很大的弹性。可是，把外来务工者赶走的理由往往是私设摊点、私搭乱建，并不是说他没有城市户口。

NFZK: Whether it’s the hukou system or the illegal housing issue, these end up just being obstacles thrown up to prevent greater influx of migrant workers into the city, even though there are already hundreds of millions of these people on the move.

Qin Hui: Exactly, these are just ways of depriving poor people of their rights. For example, the illegal housing concept is somewhat arbitrary, if they had an unambiguous definition of what is legal and what is not, and upheld the letter of the law, they might end up kicking out a bunch of urban dwellers. But you can’t kick out the urban dwellers, because they have a city hukou, and even if they live in a dog house you wouldn’t be able to expel them from the city, and so you can see this system’s flexibility. However, one of the main reasons for expelling migrants are the private markets and stalls they set up, or the haphazard houses being thrown up, not because they don’t have a city hukou.

秦晖：前几年讨论民族主义的时候，有人说西方的民主很虚伪，比如看起来对黑人多好，其实白人心里还是很歧视黑人的。已故的何家栋先生就写了一篇文章，提出伪善和伪恶的概念。他说，对，其实西方很多白人心里是看不起黑人的，但行为上他们必须对黑人非常尊重，说这是虚伪也可以，但这种虚伪是一大进步；“文革” 时，很多人其实是很同情“牛鬼蛇神”的，心里并不认为他们是坏人，但必须表现出一种对他们的歧视甚至仇恨，上去踢两脚打两拳，否则就可能受到责难和迫害，这就很糟糕了。

我认为一个社会应该有伪善机制，因为人性总是不尽善的。荀子很早就说过“人性本恶，善者为也”，善都是装出来的，你可以说他是提出了伪善的概念，但如果社会有一种机制，让好人能做好事，坏人至少不做坏事，或被迫做一些好事，那当然是有积极意义的。应该避免一种机制，使人表现得比他心里想的更坏。

Qin Hui: A few years ago, some people were discussing democracy and saying that western democracies were in fact hypocritical, for example because it seems that they treat black people well but in fact white people still, in their hearts, look down on black people. As a consequence, people like He Jiadong wrote an essay about hypocritical values of good and bad, and said that even though many white people still look down on white people, they still had to treat black people with respect, and you can call that hypocritical if you want, but such hypocrisy is still a sign of progress: during the Cultural Revolution, many people believed in the “ox spirits and snake gods”, didn’t think they were bad people, but had to publicly express a form of hatred or discrimination towards them by kicking and punching them, for otherwise they would receive condemnation themselves, which is really terrible.

I believe that society ought to have a mechanism for producing or encouraging such “hypocritical” goodness, because human nature is not perfectly good. Xun Tze said that people are by nature evil, but can learn to act good, so you could say that he was the first to propose this concept of hypocritical good, but if society had a mechanism for such a thing, to let good people do good things and let bad people not do too much damage, or be forced to do some good things, this would still be a positive thing. What we should avoid is a system where there are more evil actions in actuality than exists in the heart.

china, urban, rural, poverty, hukou, justice, philosophy, housing, house, slums, history, Beijing, Qin Hui, professor

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I think it was a happy coincidence that I watched Mike Leigh’s Naked and Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within) in succession, on the same day. Both are character-driven movies about men who, on the surface, appear to live in the same world as us. Sure, they’re troubled—but only temporarily so.

Of course, it turns out that this isn’t the case. Johnny (from Naked) and Alain (from Le Feu Follet are in various states of Sartrean nausea. They’ve lost existential traction but no one seems them slipping, at least not in the way they really are. The inner context is a secret we all possess, but they so more than others, more than the rest of us. They are outsiders—it could not be otherwise.

Maurice is about to commit suicide. No one sees it coming. Everyone thinks there is hope for him. Everyone thinks that he’s been down, but he’s a plucky and resilient type of guy. From what we can surmise from the film about his past—he was a socialite, maybe a playboy, and most certainly the life of the party. He used to have it so together. And yet, something happened to him. It seems to be something more than issues with his estranged American wife. Surely, a failed relationship is no reason to commit suicide, right? His suicide doesn’t come at the end of some vicious mood—it’s premeditated, methodical.

Johnny is a bit different—we first get acquainted with him as he’s raping a woman. He’s not instantly likable, and it would hardly beggar the imagination call him an emotional parasite. He seems to play with people, goading them, leading them on, a demonic actor-director of dramas in his mind that we (and the other characters) cannot even begin to fathom. There’s something inherently vengeful and misogynistic about how he treats the women in the film, even including the ones he supposedly cares for.

His emotional vampire act left me bewildered. How can someone sustain themselves like, that for long. My answer is that most people cannot, and that’s why Johnny is at the end of his tether. The real source of his angst is not Y2k, and it’s not his exile from Manchester, and it’s even more not the feelings that stirred by being around old flame Louise. The source of his angst is his aloneness and outsider status.

There are tender moments in both films, where old friendships seem, at least for awhile, to offer the possibility of redemption. But in the end, neither Alain or Johnny can dally too long. In the case of Alain, I was never under much illusion that he would change his mind, it seemed a foregone conclusion that he would die on the 23rd of July, and the only question left was how. On the other hand, when Johnny and Louise are having that conversation in the bathroom, and she decided to go back to Manchester that very day, you wonder or not if this is the happy ending that we had all hoped for. Actress Leslie Sharpe, who plays Louise, is resplendent in this deceptively simple scene—the shots of her face as she talks with Johnny and they find out that they still have feelings for each other and might go back to Manchester together. That scene left a deep impression on me, if only because it the ONE bright light in the bleak landscape of the film. I had seen the film before but had forgotten how it ended, so the scene and the end of the film still hit me as if I’d been watching it for the first time. So when you see Johnny taking the money and limping away, the sun behind him, it’s a bit devastating. It’s as if he knew that he couldn’t really make good on his promise to Louise. It’s as if he knew that getting close to another human being—opening to them to the point that you might become an integral part of their happiness—was just something he couldn’t hack. And so he drifts, yet again. The selfish impulses of the man are nothing if not consistent.

Alain, never seems to waver. You begin to admire the man for being so methodical. He ends a visit to his old friend by lambasting the fellow for choosing the path of mediocrity. The says in reply that although outwardly he might seem mediocre, with his nice apartment and kid and bourgeois lifestyle, but that his passion is still there. It’s that he lives without passion, but that his passion has been transferred to these extremely mundane things. Throughout the film you don’t get the sense that Alain is killing himself out of artistic principle—that is, there is no great ideology behind his suicide, it’s just an intractable sadness that transforms him, a huge glitch in the neurons that throws everything off. Yet in this scene, with his friend, you really hear him speak out, about the choices that people make, the ramifications of those choices, for him, for the friends who made those choices, for their lives, for their friendship. It’s one of the more rare “outbursts” that Alain has during the film.

I’m not sure where to end this. These are both excellent films that etch themselves in my mind in a way that ensemble pieces or movies with dense plots lines cannot—I suppose that there is just something inherently more captivating about movies that deal with the inner depths of the individual.

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So I find myself at Starbucks, and you know how Chinese people aren’t that great at making lines. I was the only one in front of these three men that had come in after me, and although I had already placed my order but not yet paid they thought it was OK to yell out their order. Two of them were on my left, and one on my right, I felt hemmed in and more pissed off than usual. I said nothing. They yell out their orders, not caring if I was done or waiting for the employee to ask them for their order. I felt contempt. One guy asked the other “do you want to a cappucino,” and the other replied “what’s a cappucino,” which only further enraged me. I know it’s a dumb thing to be snobbish, and to be snobbish about coffee at that, but when you get these people that think they’re hotshots come in to Starbucks and they don’t even know what a cappucino is…but I said nothing and fumed inside, as I’ve become accustomed to doing in China.

I sat down with my coffee and began to read Taiwanese playwright/filmmaker/writer Stan Lai’s book on creativity. Books like that, about the process and philosophy of creativity, are quite interesting, especially coming from someone like Lai–I’m not a huge fan of his, but he’s man of certain achievement and his diagrams illustrating the creative process are interesting because they are, at once, a phenomenology of the creative process as well as distillation of his thoughts on the relation of how we take our memories, sensory experience, knowledge, and values and make art out of it. In other words, he makes claims about what good art is and how it’s made.

Anyhow, I’m having a good time reading this until I notice that even with my mp3 player on I can still hear a noisy group of Shanghainese people next to me. I look over and sure enough it’s a bunch of men (and a few ladies) jabbering loudly, as they do, giving the impression that they are somehow trying to outdo each other. I can understand some Shanghai dialect, but if I can’t hear it that clearly and trying to concentrate on something else, it all ends up sounding like gibberish. I think that if you don’t understand a language, or even if you do and it’s not your native tongue, you’re going to find something off-putting about the way that it’s spoken by the natives. I find that with American English as well–I sure as hell don’t have a problem with the language per se, but there are some teenage girls that speak American English in a way that makes me want self-immolate and jump off a building.

I looked over, half hoping that my typical passive-aggressive strategy of glaring might make them stop, but of course, why would they notice me? Then I noticed that, in addition to their ugly striped short-sleeve collared shirts, one of the men was wearing shorts with white socks and black leather shoes, which made me even angrier than before.

If you read just up to there and didn’t know who I was, you might think I’m a complete asshole, and that’s not altogether false, but what’s interesting is not that I get pissed off about these things, but why–know enough about a person’s various pet peeves, and the relative intensity with which they peeve the person, and you can learn something fundamental about who they are and how they interact with the world.

I, for example, was listening to Elliott Smith’s beautiful “Pretty (ugly) Before”, which I think is a beautiful song, a shining example of the talent that Smith had, and a song in which there are so many things–the languid acoustic guitar in the verse, the electric guitar in the solo, the lyrics–that make this the kind of music that feels “real,” i.e. the opposite of the cookie-cutter, manufactured shit music that rings false because it doesn’t feel like it’s just hypothetical stuff that some corporate song-writing hack made up. I was in this perfect world and then the reality principle kicked in: the people upped their volume, and made it hard for me to hear my music, read, and think.

Ironic thing was, in Lai’s book I read this thing about how the Europeans “discovered” Bali and thought it was paradise, because not only was the weather great and the place beautiful, but because everyone there was an “artist”–they could all dance their local and ritual dances and make handicrafts. Yet they had no idea what the word “art” meant, and no conception of what “art” was, because they were so far from a modern division of labor wherein there are these people called “artists” whose job it is to create art. Lai claimed the Europeans said this was paradise.

I thought about this, and it seemed that the reason why I’ve been so infatuated with Greece, France, and Europe of late is that the people, culture, and environment strike me as being closer to some ideal conception of how people should be. And this is where I glimpsed something fundamental about my own identity, and my way of interacting with the world. I am always going to be annoyed by people that, like many Shanghainese, have that nouveau riche air about them–they have money to throw around but are, as someone (perhaps Sartre?) in the Parisian establishment remarked of Camus–”a peasant in his Sunday finest.” That’s a cruel thing to say, but again, that’s why I liked Hong Kong and Taiwan seemed so much better–making a generalization here, people are more polite, more cultured, more sophisticated. These things are embodied in the behavior an demeanor of people–it’s not something that you can fake altogether.

And i think that’s what drives me to keep looking for cool places to hang out or live. That’s why I love reading about Austin, Portland, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and other meccas for creatives, indies, and dropouts. The act of reading the articles about these places, followed by the act of imagining myself traipsing around these places, is purely fantasy–but that’s what some people are driven by. Maybe “fantasy” is the wrong word: you are driven by the sense that life is still big, and possibilities abound, and that you are free enough to craft, shape, mold that life into something that fits you. You know that you can’t change people (in Shanghai, everywhere) but you dream that there is some kind of place where you can just “fit in.” A place that resonates with you, that somehow possesses the kind of people and culture you need to thrive, to do your work, to relax and enjoy life properly, to lead a good life.

As i just explained, this too is the source of my discontent with China–it’s just too far from my fantasy city-state world where everyone is cosmopolitan and educated, stylish and cultured. Of course, I have never been anywhere that really comes close to that ideal. And even places like Paris and Athens that do come close only do so because I’m viewing them through the rose-colored glasses of the stranger, the one-time tourist. Delve deeper and you’ll no doubt hit a strata of complete asswipes too.

In the meantime, I have to find some way of reconciling myself to the world as it is, to the reality that surrounds me right here and now: sweltering and disgusting Shanghai of the summer. I have to try to find something inspiring about this place, something from its natural environment, built environment, culture, and people–or from everyday life, which combines all of those. And really，I can’t. In Seattle, I had the snow-capped Cascades and Mt. Rainier, as well as the beauty of Puget Sound. In southern Cali you have the beaches and sunshine, the nice malls, the food…

I just read an article about why the French and Americans are obnoxious tourists–because they expect too much. The Americans expect the same kind of service they get in the US everywhere else, and the French, who live in the country which is supposedly the world’s #1 tourist destination, are so accustomed to vacationing in their own country that when they leave it, and find that not everything is as nice and not everyone speaks French, start throwing hissy fits and being obnoxious.

Somehow, I think that being an expat in China for so long has not changed that aspect of me–I expect certain things, from people, probably b/c I expect a lot from myself (excuse the pop psychology here but you know it’s true). It’s that perfectionistic streak. It’s that thing that is never satisfied with who I am, and what I am. I will never be able to sit down next to a table of noisy and garrulous Shanghainese and not think anything of it. I suppose I might prefer the loudness of Italians, but probably not. I like that boisterousness and joie de vivre but honestly, only in small doses. There are plenty of times that I prefer the quiet, diffident, hushed tones of conversation that you might find in England or Japan, where everyone covers their mouths when talking and looks straight down as to avoid unnecessary eye contact.

So where you can find people like that, who are loud and cantankerous or soft-spoken and polite when you want them to be? Nowhere. What you want is for people to be like you. What you want is for people to act the way you want to act given your particular mood and circumstances in life that moment. The realization is that this is the emotional field of gravity in which I now–and perhaps will always move in. What makes things different for me is that I am probably a bit more sensitive about these things than other people. Most people have a larger emotional buffer zone than do I–I get riled up a lot easier and that’s why I will sometimes seem melodramatic or mercurial: what I am doing is making adjustments, trying desperately to get out of a place or situation that offers no hope of real gratification, and trying with all my will to move some place closer to what it is I had in mind, some place where everything is going to feel like a pair of old slippers, some place where I will fit in, where I don’t have to explain myself, where I don’t have to be relegated to the margins, where I belong and know it and everyone else does to. It’s quite puerile, in many ways, and yet I think that’s how human beings, on a certain level, operate. It might not be a good idea to give into it, but I think
we ignore such impulses at our own peril.

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