Human beings live; and they love their own lives with an ardor and a stubbornness that never relent. Yet how many of them have ever paused to ask what the value of the self might be, what the meaning of existence might consist in? Who has ever solved this riddle of the Sphinx? The tumultuous mundane world—whether in the carefree pleasures of song and dance, or in the toiling days that pass as slowly as years—forever directs our gaze outward, drawing us either into indulgence in enjoyment or into laments over suffering, so that we forget precisely the human being himself. Only the philosophical poets have ever been troubled by this unsolvable riddle. And yet even their bitter searching has come to nothing. Baudelaire painted human life as a gloomy and ugly picture; Nietzsche lodged the meaning of existence in the brightly painted doll perched upon a faraway, drifting cloud—the Übermensch; and even Lu Xun, that figure of stern endurance, was forced to sigh: "To excavate the heart and eat it, in order to know its true taste. The wound, the cruelty of the pain—how then could one ever know the true taste?"[1] The riddle seems to be wrapped in a misty veil; it beckons from afar, luring the wise to seek it out, while forever refusing to let anyone draw near.
Moluo's prose poem "Life on Trial" is, likewise, a deep meditation on the value of the individual and on the meaning of existence. Naturally, the poet has not arrived at a final conclusion either; but he points us, from a distinctive angle, to a possibility: perhaps the value and meaning of human life do not lie in any fixed and unchanging answer, but in the very act of unceasing search.
"Life on Trial" is divided into four chapters. The four relatively independent sections are like the multiple variations of a symphony, together setting off a single, richly resonant theme.
The Old Man
The opening chapter depicts an old man who has exhausted the time of his life and is dragging along a decaying body. His eyes are filled with emptiness; his shriveled lips quiver but make no sound. He is like a thin stream whose source has run dry, unable to advance any further; he seeps into the layer of mud and disappears, leaving not a single trace. A man who has lived out his life with bitterness—his existence is no different from nothingness. Under the poet's brush, the figure of the Old Man is concrete and palpable, lifelike enough to be touched, and at the same time charged with a symbolic resonance. He is, as the poet says by way of metaphor, "like a frozen solid": he has occupied a place in the world in vain, leaving no value behind.
The Wanderer
If the Old Man has never once thought of his own value—or has at last begun to want to think, only to find himself no longer able—then the Wanderer of the second chapter, at the very edge of death, "suddenly thinks of the meaning of life's existence." "But then, what can be done?" His best years have long drifted away on his wanderings. With nothing he loved, with nothing he sought, he walked the road to its end—and walked it to no avail. When he turns back upon himself, looking for his own value, he has already lost the chance to realize it. Yet the poet does not draw so simple a conclusion. In the still of the night, from far off, comes a mysterious, deep-toned bell—the bell "filled with invisible force, the bell of religious solemnity." This bell seems to be a symbol, a quiet hint, dimly imparting an insight: even on the verge of life's end, so long as a person begins to think of the meaning of his existence, that meaning is already contained therein. For whatever existence is grasped by self-consciousness is real existence—and so a valued existence. It will be "filled with invisible force" and with "religious solemnity."
The Night-Waker
Standing motionless before the deep-night window of the third chapter is a middle-aged "night-waker." The heavy muscles of his face are like rock that will never ripple; there are no lines of laughter. He thinks of his father, he thinks of himself, he thinks of his son—"a story, the simplest, crudest, dimmest of stories," endlessly repeated. He sighs, blames himself. He wishes to escape the shadow of his forefathers' fate; "a face full of cold frost and the dust of the road" is the proof of his struggle and his striving. Yet the human being exists also as a species: every individual, before he is even born, has been enclosed within a fated, predetermined circle, and can never transcend the destiny of the whole of humankind in order to obtain the value of the individual. And yet, this futile struggle and striving display, at the same time, the value of the "night-waker" that distinguishes him from his fathers.
The Woman
In the final chapter, the poet writes of a woman insulted and injured. She has paid out her whole youth and her whole life, yet has received no love in return. She is like a worn-out bath towel, a broken light bulb, a shattered instrument—used up and then flung onto the refuse heap. At last she utters her question: "But the flowering branch of my youth has been broken off and plucked clean… what else could possibly be left?" The night is still, black; no one answers. And yet, although "the world has left no trace of love upon her," has she not, for her part, given her love to the world?
Trial of the Soul, Wisdom of the Poet
The poet is austere. He does not explain and still less does he console: he interrogates. Sternly, mercilessly, he sits in judgment upon the old man, the wanderer, the night-waker, and the woman at the brink of death. No—more precisely, he is sitting in judgment upon his own soul. In the trial of his own soul, he wrings out the value of the person and the meaning of existence—a value and a meaning condensed, like drops of a martyr's blood-red carnelian blood, out of unspeakable suffering.
The poet is also wise. His is a poetic wisdom. He does not lay bare his reflections on human life in any naked form; rather he dissolves them into poetic feeling and casts them into several groups of vivid images, which, in the form of multiple variations, resound off one another and pile upon one another, gradually unfolding for us the secret depths of thought together with the beauty of poetic feeling.