Letter to a Close Friend (給老友的信)

Recently, a very close friend of mine from my university days came back from Canada. He told me that owing to the influence of his wife, he has become a Christian. He had resisted being such for a very long time. His wife belongs to one of those who have from an extremely early age been a very "devout" Christian who took every word in the Bible as the literal "word of God" and who has little ability to think outside of the "box" of "Christianity". I felt sorry for him. Out of concern for his well-being, I wrote him a long letter after he got back to Canada, trying to make him see the light: the light of reason. I won't mention his name.  The following is the edited text of my letter to him, which I think might be useful not just for my dear friend.

People do have to believe in something, For some, it's the Christian God, for the Jews, it's Yahweh, for Muslims, it's Allah (although all three are in fact exactly the same God, just named and interpreted differently in different cultural contexts) ; and for still others eg. for the Hindus, it's Brahma and for the Buddha, it's the Wisdom of Life; for the Chinese, it's either Confucianism or Taoism and for the more politically minded, it's democracy, Marxism, socialism, communism, communitarianism, anarchism and for “Communist” China, it's Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Dengism ; and for some philosophers, like Plato, Spinoza and Hegel, it's Logos (literally the word of Reason) or Rational Spirit or Mind (“Geist”) .

Eperdument (Down by Love) (狂愛)

It is often said that love is blind. Philosophers like Plato taught that love is a noble virtue, a kind of non-sexual relationship between heterosexual friends, an arête and that we must distinguish between eros and philia. Believers in the monotheistic god tell us that love or agape has its origin in that greatest source of everything in the universe, that fountain of that Greatest Love that can possibly exist, called variously God, Allah, Yahweh. Moralists tell us that love is the kind of unselfish human kindness, compassion, and affection, loyalty and benevolent concern of one human being for another. Yet, biologist tell us that love is merely the kind of physiological reaction felt by human being, like other animals when he/she is ready to mate and for that purpose to copulate. If so, is love equivalent to love-making?  Can love be reduced to mere animal passion, without sense, difficult if not impossible to control by our reason which Aristotle and countless other philosophers tell us is something which distinguishes a man from an animal? Who is right? Who is wrong? Can we even sensibly discuss the question at all? Is it a meaningful question in the first place? If it's a meaningful question, what do we mean by "meaningful"? Do we know what we are talking about when we think or say that we are talking about "love"?

Mal de Pierre (From the land of the Moon) (迷情花月)

Love is a subject women are never tire of. They can never have enough of it. Otherwise, one  can't really explain why all through the years, the counters for "romantic fiction" are always placed on the ground floor of all multi-storeyed bookstores and in all ground floor bookstore, they are always placed very close to the entrance. Women live for love and some even die for love. There's nothing women will not do for "love. I'll leave it to the evolutionary psychologists, individual psychologist, Freudian analysts, sociologists and philosophers to work out why. But ever since Gustave Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary and Thomas Hardy wrote the Trumpet Major and others about women living in suffocatingly boring rural environment, whose leisure is consumed by reading fictive tales of "grand passion" with dashing soldiers in smart military uniforms or some other "romantic" or "heroic"  Byronic figures and whose sole ambition in life seems to engage themselves, at least once, in such "amorous adventure" before they consider their lives complete because for them, art trumps life and "reality": there is nothing they long for more than to be the subject of such an "art": the art of falling in love with the idea of "falling in love". Nicole Garcia's Mal de Pierre  (From the land of the Moon) (迷情花月), adapted from the novel Mal de Pietre by Italian novelist Milena Agus  after which the film is entitled, is the latest in the same lines.