Moonlight pours down, the bamboo rustles. There is no one around, only wind, gust upon gust. Their laughter is so clear and bright that hearing it sets the heart trembling, like a pebble dropped into a lake, ripples spreading out ring by ring. The waves of water come in waves, gently washing the shore, declaring their existence; but the moment the wind stops, there is no sound at all. Because bamboo is, after all, only bamboo: without an outside force, it will not announce itself.
Life is like fireworks rising, slowly, straight upward into the night sky, glimmering with fine threads of blue-white light against a vast black field at the very limit of sight, then bursting into bloom. Across too great a distance, no sound reaches you -- you cannot hear the various anxieties, sorrows, indifference, disappointments, joys and longings of being alive, nor can you hear, at the moment of dissipation, the relief, the reluctance, the calm, the regret. However many of those gestures of lighting up the night sky there may be, surging forward one after another, they are still nothing more than tiny, futile self-destructions that cannot even mount a protest. Within a heavy, solemn silence, scattered sparks erupt, mournfully trembling and disappearing -- and that only makes the moonlight look all the more luminous.
I dare not dream too far-reaching dreams, fearing that on waking it will all be empty joy. What is more pitiful still is that, in the blink of an eye, even that disappointment will be forgotten along with everything else, and the sorrow brought by such forgetting will, by the same forgetting, also be unremembered. We come into the world carrying only the most innocent of hopes, and although we are as fragile as a piece of glass, we don't realize it; we insist on burning ourselves fiercely, only to plunge in the end into an icy lake, suddenly cracking open in fine lines, sinking to the bottom, striking against an old stone covered in slick green algae, breaking dully into countless fragments, no longer daring or able to make any sound. Each one of those countless cold fragments mirrors the dream that once hoped to rise into the heights of the sky. Even after being smashed to pieces, who would have thought that the night sky -- itself only another kind of sorrow -- was still beyond what such earth-bound things could ever reach?
Dancing a dance no one notices, a dance even I cannot give a name to. It is not that I like it, nor that I dislike it -- it is only that, in the midst of numbness, tears silently fall in quiet desolation. It has been so from time immemorial, it remains so now, and in that infinitely extending distance, it will be so forever.