Ace Secret Agent 2008 Program

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Optimism for Life - "Marginalia on Life"

钱钟书's writings are always witty, humorous, and yet full of philosophy. Take the title of this book, for example. Whatdoes it mean? In the preface, Qian Zhongshu writes: "If life is a great book, then the following essays are only marginalia on life. This book is really big! It can't be finished all at once, and there are still many blank spaces on the margins of the pages already written." Suddenly, it dawned on me. Indeed, how much of the great book of life can we comprehend? To be able to write something on its margins is already quite good. We students are not yet qualified to annotate the margins of life - at least I am not qualified yet. Therefore, I can only choose asmall section from Qian Zhongshu's great work "Marginalia on Life" and write a brief impression on the margins of the essay "On Happiness." It can be considered as scribbling a few words in the blank spaces on the margins of the book.

After all, I am still a child. I have never felt that life is too long or too short. Therefore, according to Qian Zhongshu's viewpoint, the life I am experiencing at the moment is neither particularly happy nor very painful, but just mediocre. However, a mediocre life can be a fact, but it should never be a viewpoint. Moreover, living a mediocre life is actually not happy, because mediocrity is dullness, it is long, it is painful. Nevertheless, although life is not happy, it is still possible to be optimistic. Although Qian Zhongshu's series of arguments prove that life cannot be eternally happy, and even that eternal happiness is not only unlikely to be realized but also absurd to think of, from the perspective of Marxist philosophy, these belong to the material realm, while consciousness is the active reflection of matter. Of course, different people's consciousness reflects different material worlds, so some people are optimistic about life, while others are pessimistic and spendtheir lives in despair. We should be optimistic about life.

Qian Zhongshu calls the contradiction between life being inherently unhappy and the fact that we should be optimistic about life a joke that life plays on our outlook on life. I am not yet enlightened enough to understand this sentence, but one thing is for sure: this contradiction is dialectically unified. Since life is destined to be unhappy, why not find joy amidst the suffering? At least spiritual happiness can offset some of the material pain, and besides, happiness is determined by the spirit. This way, at least we will feel what happiness is. The pain of life is precisely because it is long, but it is precisely because it is long that we have enough time to seek happiness, to experience happiness - even if happiness is fleeting. The two sides of the contradiction are dialectically unified. By living an optimistic life, one will become more open-minded, and everything will become relatively better; by looking at the world pessimistically, life, which is already painful, will become even longer, and everything that is detestable will be infinitely magnified. Therefore, although life is destined to be unhappy, we can still live an optimistic life.

5 Brief Modern Literary Criticisms (120 words each)

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