Reason for Living #3: Music

guest essay by author R.F. Kuang

Painting by Trevor Waugh

Today’s guest essay for REASONS FOR LIVING with Esmé Weijun Wang is by

R.F. Kuang

.

Rebecca F. Kuang is the award-winning, #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, and Yellowface and Katabasis (forthcoming). Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards. She has been named to the 2023 Time100 Next list and the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2024. A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies Sinophone literature and Asian American literature.

Thank you so very much to Rebecca for being this edition’s guest essayist. 🩵

A few things conspired in the last month that reminded me of last summer in Taipei.

First, in a conversation with a Chinese teacher, I asked about a phrase I had encountered in a short story. 小确幸. Xiǎo què xìng, a “small, certain happiness.” It seemed so particular that I assumed it had to be a term of art. Where did it come from? She told me it was a phrase that originated in Japanese; that one novelist had used it, Haruki Murakami? The small and certain happiness of a fresh-baked loaf of bread.

Second, a few days later, I came across the same phrase in Yi-Ling Liu’s essay “Recycling in Paradise” during her summer at the same program. It turns out that “a small of certain happiness” is already a social phenomenon, a way for young people to grapple with environmental, economic, and geopolitical volatility they cannot predict or control. When grand ambitions are no longer possible, one turns to the modest, good things. For Liu, kitchenware and digital stickers. For me, music.

Third, I went to a faculty piano concert on campus. On the program: Liszt’s Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude, and Rachmaninoff’s Six moments musicaux. It has been a while since I sat in a concert. I had forgotten the trance it sends me into. Ninety minutes of ecstasy.   

Last summer in Taipei, I was halfway through my program when I received the news that my grandfather had passed away. My then-fiance had just returned to the States. I was alone, with five more weeks of coursework before I could go home. But the whole project of polishing my Chinese – all in the deferred promise of having the conversations I hoped one day to have with my grandparents – seemed so pointless. Depression hit. I stopped eating, dreaming, or smiling. I found myself walking aimlessly around the city most nights because it was better than lying listless in my cramped, dark apartment.

I was living near the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall, so I often ended up there, drawn like a firefly towards the bright, clean colors of the twin performing arts venues: the National Theater and Concert Hall. They are loveliest at night, when the lights turn on, brilliant warm yellows through red pillars. Eventually, I discovered that you could go inside and even attend concerts there, and I wound up going several times a week to attend whatever classical music programming was on. It was just a place to be for several hours. And it took my mind somewhere else.

Music does not demand your participation. Of course, active listening opens up more layers of a symphony. But even if you are listless and distracted, even if you are brain-fuzzed and starving, throat sore from fits of uncontrollable crying, the music still slides into your bones. You cannot, for instance, listen to Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 without watching the fantasy play out in your mind’s eye. Quivering strings – birds trilling. An echoing horn. A general on a battlefield. Spirits in the night.

A small and certain happiness. A lovely concept, but it doesn’t seem expansive enough to capture what that music did to me that summer. I was not taking refuge in a little thing. I was reminded again and again of the basic fact that there were still things of beauty in the world, things worth engaging in, things that would continue to be beautiful even when I was not in the state to receive them. What I found at the National Concert Hall was the certain happiness of an expansive, unending beauty. And it was captivating enough to bring me back, night after night, until one day I was able again to hear the music on my own.

Photo: Julian Baumann

Links : 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/kuangrf
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kuangrf
Website: https://rfkuang.com
Substack:

10% of the proceeds from each REASONS FOR LIVING newsletter go to an organization of the guest essayist’s choice. R.F. Kuang has chosen the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), founded in 1991 by concerned humanitarians in the USA. The PCRF provides free medical care to thousands of injured and ill children yearly who lack local access to care within the local health care system.  Over the years, they’ve sent over 2,000 affected children abroad for free medical care, sent thousands of international doctors and nurses to provide tens of thousands of children free medical care in local hospitals, and provided tens of thousands of children humanitarian aid and support they otherwise would not get.  

PCRF's impact also includes establishing two pediatric cancer departments in Palestine, a new PICU and pediatric cardiology department in Ramallah, and many more critical projects to sustainably bolster the region's healthcare system. Please consider donating here.

If you enjoyed this free edition of REASONS FOR LIVING with Esmé Weijun Wang, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive two bonus personal essays by me per month. We also have monthly Fireside Chats, which are gatherings to discuss, play, and learn about creativity and limitations. They also help me to pay the bills, as my chronic illness and disabilities prohibit me from working a standard job.

Peter Quince at the Clavier
Wallace Stevens

                                I

Just as my fingers on these keys 
Make music, so the self-same sounds 
On my spirit make a music, too.

Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain 
Waked in the elders by Susanna;

Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while 
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

The basses of their beings throb 
In witching chords, and their thin blood 
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.
 

                                II

In the green water, clear and warm, 
Susanna lay.
She searched 
The touch of springs,
And found 
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.

Upon the bank, she stood 
In the cool 
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.

She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids, 
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.

A breath upon her hand 
Muted the night.
She turned—
A cymbal crashed,
And roaring horns.
 

                                III

Soon, with a noise like tambourines, 
Came her attendant Byzantines.

They wondered why Susanna cried 
Against the elders by her side;

And as they whispered, the refrain 
Was like a willow swept by rain.

Anon, their lamps’ uplifted flame 
Revealed Susanna and her shame.

And then, the simpering Byzantines 
Fled, with a noise like tambourines.
 

                                IV

Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting 
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral 
Celebration of a maiden’s choral.

Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings 
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death’s ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays 
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Art by Marek Luzar

Rebecca gets to the center of her love for music in a period of bereavement by discovering the phrase 小确幸. Xiǎo què xìng, a “small, certain happiness.” In your most recent epoch of sadness, what has been your 小确幸? How did you discover (or re-discover) it, what was it like, and what did it bring to your life?

Please feel free to journal privately about this prompt, or to share it in the comments section below.

If you enjoyed this free edition of REASONS FOR LIVING with Esmé Weijun Wang, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive two bonus personal essays by me per month. We also have monthly Fireside Chats, which are gatherings to discuss, play, and learn about creativity and limitations. They also help me to pay the bills, as my chronic illness and disabilities prohibit me from working a standard job.