溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Why Does Longing Keep Us From Sleep?
Why does unfulfilled longing make us toss and turn through the night?
The graceful one — awake or asleep, I seek her. Seeking and not finding, I toss and turn all night.
The editor's choice to place "Guan Ju" at the head of the songbook bred a long debate. Han scholars read this love song as a political allegory praising a queen's virtue, sublimating the longing between man and woman into the harmony of good rule. Later poets and readers, by contrast, returned it to a plain love song, receiving the very fact that the first poem is a love song as a rightful place for human feeling. Should love's longing be read as a figure for something higher, or honored in itself? The question still divides those who see feeling as a tool of cultivation from those who see it as an end.
That a sleepless longing three thousand years old matches our nights today shows this question never ages. Love's tossing returns across the generations.
The very first poem in China's oldest songbook is a love song.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
The very first poem in China's oldest songbook is a love song. It opens with waterbirds crying by the river, then turns to a heart that seeks one person awake and asleep but cannot have her, tossing all night. Confucius said of this poem: "joyful without excess, sorrowful without injury." I am struck that this ancient tossing differs not at all from my own nights. Three thousand years ago, too, someone could not sleep for unfulfilled longing. Why is love's longing so old, and so unchanged? I stand at that riverbank too.
✍️Your Answer
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