Ode to the Nightingale

Yesterday, I discussed about death. Today, in Keats's Ode to the Nightingale, he talked life's intolerable and his half in love with easful Death like a draught of wine and fall a sleep and ceased forever. An other way of coping with life's intolerably is using imagination to escape from life's hardship. However, in his last conclusion in this poem, his imaginative power only can help him escape from life temporarily.

I had thought of easful death like the handling of uncured animals by injection to put them down in a humanistic way. There is no argument in managing comfortable dying for animals by lots of argument in managing human's comfortable death. If you are rich enough, you can arrange your death as comfortable as you wish to avoid suffering dying in Swissland where it has law to legalize this kind of death but not as easy as you live in most of the countries that do not legalize arranging death.

In traditional value in Confucius teaching, it emphasis how to arrange parents' funeral in a proper way to show respectful to the ancestors. They do not think of how to die respectfully. To die by arrangement is an issue in modern society which medical advance makes life last longer than they should be naturally and that makes the life for the illness person unbearable.

If we can help the dogs and cats cease in a humanistic way, it is much more a moral issue to help the uncured person to die comfortablly and respectfully as he or she wishes and arranges. And that is my wish for my death too if I come into this stage.

After sharing my view of how to die, Ode to the Nightingale also makes me think of how to cope with suffering in life. Keats' talked about using a draught of wine to make you forget the pain of life but he used his own imagination to avoid life's despair and misable. However, he did know that it would not take you away from life's reality. You still have to face your daily life. Even though it is true that we cannot quit from life by imagination, we can choose the picture of our inner world. When we come to a situation like terminal illness or situation that we cannot control our suffering, one thing we still can control is to creat our inner mind. It is not fantasy or ways to fool yourselves. It is a way to heal and a way of empowerment yourself. You choose to think something good, something that much appeal to yourself that you know that it is your imagination and it is not true but it is good. That is what Keats talking about the Truth of the Imagination.

It is a defference between mental illness and the power of imagination. In mental illness,  patient creat an illusion that they do not aware and think it is the reality to help them to cope with life's stress. What I think of the power of imagination is the mental power that you choose to focus your mind in something that is favourable and good for you.  The person who use this power know that it is his imagination not the reality but refer to his inner world, it is true and it is his own reality he choose. I think, we can creat this ability or power in our daily life if we cultivate our intelligence in literature and art, we can create and stay more in a beautiful inner world which can be true. That is like what Keats said in his Ode on the Grecian Urn: Beauty is truth, true beauty.

To Autumn

After a long time stop writing, today is 26 Feb 2013, I started to write again.

Today, I read the SparkNotes on Keats's Ode, To Autumn, it is a very good analysis: simple and precise.
What did John Keats think about To Autumn when he writing this Ode?
In his letter to his friends, Reynold,  talking about his feeling of this season, Autumn, he experienced. At that time, he was in lots of troubles: no money, no hope of earning any money from his literacy power, no hope to marry Fanny. He even did not dare to go back to Wentworth Place to see Fanny. He even suffered from the disease that killed his brother and he knew that he might soon be died too. He was  desperately no hope for the future. However, when he went for a walk under the golden season of Autumn. The Nature gave him rich colour, fruits smell, all harvest --Time to celebrate for the whole year's effort and to prepare for the coming of Winter. He suddenly forgot his own troubles and absorbed in the fruitfulness of this Season and wrote To Autumn. And the poem shown that he was more in peace, accepting all come to him as the cycle of the Nature.

When I read To Autumn, it led me thought of the death people face when they are at the life stage of elderly. Like me, getting older, awaring of more and more wrinkles on my face, death seems closer and closer. What we think of death?

The Christian belief consider Death is a punishment of Sin. By believing in Jesus, through his redemption, we have elternal life. Death seems the end of this earthly life and the start of the elternal life if you believe so.

In the traditional Chinese philosophy, I mean the teaching of  Confucius, they do not think of death that much cause they do not provide any wisdom on death, they consider how to live properly much more important about any thing happen after death. That is why they have so many teaching about how to handle the funeral properly which is for the living people but not for the dead. They ignor death cause it is nothing when thinking about life.

The teaching of Zhuangzi has something taught about death-- Death is just a natural phenomena.  Life and Death is just a cycle of the Nature. So life comes and goes. It is the natural law. As it is natural, we do not need to love life and hate death. We can only accept this natural phenomena and follow the Law. From the human's perspective, we get used to those people and lives around us and we do not want to leave them. However, when we stand out above the human's feeling and take the experience of the natural environment. We knows there is time of life and there is time of death. And John Keats's To Autumn is much similiar to Zhuangzi's teaching which I apppreciated and is much more closer to my understanding and feeling.

After come back from Hong Kong, I started reading Zhuangzi and Confucicus and thinking of their teaching. I tried to integrate all I read.