有一天下課後一位學生跑來詢問是否可以和我聊聊，我總是對此感到一點驚訝和喜悅，後來想想，會使他們敞開心胸與我相談的原因也許是我的身分較不同於一般人：一位上了年紀、有點神祕感、沒有老師包袱的人，或許這樣的人可以提供他們不同的觀點。這位同學和女友有溝通上的問題，他時常不曉得如何表達自己的情感，導致雙方常常冷戰，他們都在乎另一個人，但是不懂得傳遞這份感受往往是造成爭端的導火線。他詢問我問題的當下我也思考了這個問題 ：我們該如何將自己的情感完整的呈現？
作為一個人，我們很難站在他人的角度去感受他們的憤怒、忌妒、以及壓力等等的情緒，當我相信我們都了解什麼是愛。舉個例子，當我說：「我現在很不爽」，我想沒有人能夠了解我不高興的程度，但假如我說；「我戀愛了」，我想各位不用經過思考就能馬上體會我的感受，既然戀愛的感覺是大家都懂的，是否有方法可以將其他感受轉化為像戀愛一般的好讓人吸收呢？我想這個答案或許是藝術，一首詩、一幅畫、一首歌就可以替我們傳遞用直述無法傳遞的情感，透過這種方式可以讓我們開啟另一座溝通的橋梁。
以下詩句出字莎士比亞十四行詩第十八號
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
這首詩基本上是在讚頌愛人的美好，開頭將愛人與夏日做比較，夏日無疑是美好的日子，但有時會有突然襲來的狂風與熱浪，不如愛人般的平靜與祥和。
對比於莎士比亞的詩集，Dreamer這本書是一本描寫詩人Pablo Neruda早年經歷的故事，Pablo Neruda是二十世紀最偉大的詩人之一，如同中國的三國演義，作者加入一些虛幻的情節述說他的事蹟，書中提到他的詩在各行各業傳遞成為家喻戶曉的作品，每個人都閱讀著他的詩篇、每個人都了解Pablo Neruda的詩所要陳述的事情，就如同我先前提到的，如此複雜而難以言喻的情感就透過一首一首的詩來傳遞。
The other day after one of my classes, a young man approached me and asked if he could speak with me for a moment. I am always deeply touched when one of my students takes me into their confidence. They are probably doing so because I am perceived as totally neutral: I am old; distant, because I am not one of their regular teachers; and am not Taiwanese, thereby proffering a different perspective. This young man had a girlfriend and was having difficulty conveying his true emotions. This lack of communication was, in turn, being reciprocated: a true standoff. They deeply cared for one another but simply could not express their feelings and frustrations. I thought to myself that this is the great dilemma of humanity, our most pressing psychological quandary. How do we truly communicate with one another? World history would suggest that, for the most part, we don’t.
That being said, I maintain that as beings, we may not understand anger, or jealousy, or stress as universals, etc. (understood by all), but we do understand love. If I say that I am angry, few people will truly comprehend what this means to me. If I say that I am in love, however, there is complete awe, understanding and acceptance. I am in a state of perceived grace. How do I broaden that comprehension into other areas of understanding? One art form, the lyrical poem, (1) expressing personal emotions or deep feelings is also easily identifiable to the average well-balanced person. This type of poetry could go a long way in breaking down solipsistic walls between people allowing for true understanding.
From Sonnet Number 18 by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (2)
The book, The Dreamer, (3) is a fictionalized account of the early life of Pablo Neruda, (4) one of the 20th century’s greatest poets. “(His) poems tramped through the mud. The fieldworker read his words and said, ‘His hands have moved the earth as mine have.’ His poems knocked at the door of mansions. The wealthy read his words and said, ’He has climbed up the same ladder.’ His poems sat at the table of the baker, who said, ‘He knows what I feel while working the bread.’ His poems marched on cobblestones. The shopkeeper leaned over his counter and read them to his customers and said, ‘Do you know him? He is my brother.’ The poems became books that people passed from hand to hand.” “If suddenly you forget me do not look for me, for I shall already have forgotten you” In this way we, as a species, will come to the understanding that which we all deserve: happiness and fulfillment. Count Tolstoy (1828-1910) leaves us with a thought: Joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.
A small joke: A diligent and thoughtful teacher stated at the beginning of a test, “I trust that I will catch no student looking at another student’s answers.” A little boy whispered, “I hope you won’t catch me either.”
This week, please reflect on your own poetic nature.
Every day look for something magical and beautiful.
Quote: As we age, we quickly see that imagination and intellectual vibrancy are casualties of life. This does not have to be the case: keep your mind alive and you will live forever.
Footnotes:
1) The term derives from a form of Ancient Greek literature, the lyric, which was defined by its musical accompaniment, usually on a stringed instrument known as a lyre.
2) The speaker opens the poem with a question addressed to the beloved: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets; it may, in fact, be the most famous lyric poem in English. On the surface, the poem is simply a statement of praise about the beauty of the beloved; summer tends to unpleasant extremes of windiness and heat, but the beloved is always mild and temperate. Sonnet 18is the first poem in the sonnets not to explicitly encourage the young man to have children: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” the speaker writes in the couplet, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
3) The Dreamer by Pam Munoz Ryan (ISBN 978-0-439-26998-8)
4). Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet-diplomat and politician Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto (1904 –1973). He derived his pen name from the Czech poet Jan Neruda.[2] He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Chile’s President Allende (1908-1973) invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.
Neruda was hospitalized with cancer at the time of the “coup d’état” led by General Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006) against the elected government of Allende. In September 1973, Neruda died of prostate cancer. Pinochet denied permission for Neruda’s funeral to be made a public event. However, thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew and crowded the streets in defiance of this perceive insult.