Viewing Platform, a Kind of Height
Viewing Platform, a Kind of Height Peng Yanjiao On the mountainside of Tiger's Mouth on Tianzi Mountain there is a small cliff, now opened up as a viewing platform. A friend told me that once, among the traveling companions, there was a young girl who closed her eyes and said she would be willing to just jump down like that. The friend asked: "Was it after the first kiss of first love?" The girl answered: "Of course." Climb onto the viewing platform, and you will know that people can withstand the impact of ugliness, but cannot withstand the impact of beauty. Heaven and earth fill the scene with radiant beauty...
Viewing Platform, a Kind of Height
Peng Yanjiao
On the mountainside of Tiger's Mouth on Tianzi Mountain there is a small cliff, now opened up as a viewing platform. A friend told me that once, among the traveling companions, there was a young girl who closed her eyes and said she would be willing to just jump down like that. The friend asked: "Was it after the first kiss of first love?" The girl answered: "Of course."
Climb onto the viewing platform, and you will know that people can withstand the impact of ugliness, but cannot withstand the impact of beauty. Heaven and earth fill the scene with radiant beauty, and what is dazzled is not only the visual faculty.
Think about it: if ten moons appeared in the sky, which would you look at first? If ten rainbows appeared, which one would you choose? The strange and resplendent rushes at you head-on, leaving no way to escape. Seeking beauty, yet shrinking back before beauty, one can only sink deeper into dizziness. You close your eyes, somewhat reproaching yourself for not being prepared, for rashly stepping onto the viewing platform at an inappropriate time.
Close your eyes, standing on the viewing platform yet closing your eyes. A piece of music played with several notes at once can only be heard with closed ears. Yes, you must stay calm. The eyes, the most faithful yet most primitive receiving organ, do not record images, cannot make the flowing stop or the stopped flow, still less can they divide images. Rigid, sluggish, always tottering and marking time in place. Yet they are also good at making one dizzy. The viewing platform, this peep-show lens made of three pieces of engraved glass, makes you, fallen inside it, not even dare to breathe, and the air around you trembles as if startled too. First, you must calm down.
Close your eyes, as a pure young girl does at her first kiss, intoxicated in the body warmth of two people conveyed through rapid breathing, plunging headlong into the great change in which a wish becomes reality in an instant, closing her eyes, instinctively giving a short, light shake of the head, swallowing a girl's uniquely refined words, so soft they cannot be heard: "Don't be like this"; closing her eyes, expressing the resolve to bear all consequences of the suddenly formed love affair known only to the two of them; closing her eyes, calming the eternal agitation that is tightly bound up with the surging tide of the heart, wanting to have a good cry yet unable to cry for the moment.
Happiness is so pure that the inexperienced pure young girl has no time to understand the splendor contained in this too-pure happiness, a splendor that never existed before and will never exist again. Closing her eyes, she does not want to see anything or hear anything, not even her own panting, because she has already seen and heard something that does not exist between heaven and earth, and by intuition knows that at this critical moment, both unexpected and yet expected, something more will happen. Knowing that in this rapid breathing there is eternity, she closes her eyes.
Knowing what she is about to lose and what she is about to gain. It can be certain: she has already escaped from the suffocation imposed by worldly custom and upbringing. Since she has escaped, many unfulfilled wishes seem already fulfilled. Since she has the courage to betray the creed she still clung to, "I will never do such a thing," and now she has done it, and done it somewhat excessively—perhaps this is what people often call losing self-control. Who cares? There is no way back, no time to worry about that anymore, she has already thrown caution to the wind. The situation of placing on the scales of love the youth she has cherished for so many years is already plain. She closes her eyes.
Close your eyes, since it is hard to express and needless to express. The eyes, as receiving organs, are clumsy; as expressing organs, they are too sensitive. Leave expression to the eyebrows and the drifting beautiful hair. Happiness is by no means an illusion. The regret of losing a good match is forever irrelevant to her. What harm is there in revealing a little contentment? Is this not very natural?
Countless millions of split seconds passed, countless millions of years passed. She opens her eyes again, and from them radiates a profound, mature light. She has already endowed the visual organ with complete function. The world is no longer a phantom to her, but a holographic image. She has already grasped the world. She is no longer the she who each morning sits before the mirror beneath the window doing her makeup, no longer the she who leans on the door in the rain, standing endlessly melancholy. She has already keenly felt that she is bidding farewell to yesterday, a resolute, renouncing farewell; she is throwing herself into today's world, an irrevocable, unreserved throwing of herself in.
Very naturally closing her eyes, she steps over the railing and leaps down the cliff. Because only by closing her eyes can she better savor the most human poetry of soaring into the blue sky and sinking into the deep sea as she plunges into the secluded valley. A high song of life is thus composed, with the melody of an inseparable struggle between love and death in which no one can tell who wins and who loses.
And I? I close my eyes in order to calm myself when facing beautiful scenery as if facing the blazing sun, in order to adjust my sensory functions and arrange the most ideal viewing procedure before the scene where the great river, like a rising tide, suddenly forgets to flow, and on the river surface suddenly surges a vast scroll split open by giant waves and pushed forward by giant waves, with the beast-hide-like majesty and primitive rudeness of the standing mountains inlaid with flashing spray, and the outlines of distant peaks as concise and practiced in their prettiness as the eyebrows raised by a female itinerant performer. This is really a bit too businesslike. When people use visual impressions to sketch the volume and weight of beauty, making it remain long in memory, when they discover that what they see far exceeds what they imagined, when in the trembling triggered by the attractive power of beauty they want to keep their balance, when they worry that opening their eyes will instead make the beautiful scene disappear, closing the eyes is very natural. I close my eyes.
Close my eyes. A pure young girl may close her eyes to cherish burning feelings, for what she believes is the most beautiful feeling understood by her alone, to express her cherishing of the ultimate meaning of life. She may, in the belief that anyone will praise her love, and because from now on she need no longer suffer over searching for and avoiding any possible, even the most minute, sign that might obstruct her sacred love, close her eyes, so as to achieve absolute harmony with beauty.
It is impossible for me to become a character in a legend. I close my eyes because I am eager to clear away the curiosity cultivated by vulgar impressions, to clear away the lowbrow tastes brought to me by both old-fashioned elegance and fashionable elegance, and the meaninglessness instilled into me through solemn channels. "Make way, all of you, let me be quiet for a while." This is what I express by closing my eyes.
To merge with the beautiful scene before me like a pure young girl and obtain the supreme poetry of humanity, what am I still lacking? Can I, like her, first feel and think with the heart, and only then with the brain? Can I, like her, be good at adjusting myself, good at freeing myself from numerous entanglements? At least for now, I cannot obtain the most wonderful intoxication she obtained in the instant she stepped over the railing.
The cliff protruding into the deep secluded valley—what supports it? It lifts me too high.