Oriental Health Aesthetics: The Time of Professor Qiu Zhenglun’s Explanation of the Book of Changes(35)

To be honest, that’s precisely how it is. In Athens, in Greece, wherever you are exposed without shade, the sunlight is far more intense than in our Chongqing. Yet once you step into the shade, beneath a tree, with the cool sea breeze blowing over, you immediately feel refreshed. That’s why his love was doomed to fail—right here.

So why was Dionysus, the god of wine, also placed here? Because the region abounds in grapes, and wine flows freely. The streets of Athens aren’t like ours, where city management clears every street vendor off the sidewalks. Every Athenian restaurant spills halfway onto the street, turning the city into a sleepless hub at night—where drinking beer doesn’t start until 8 or 9 PM. Thus, the Dionysian and Apollonian spirits form the two extremes of art, which we also touched upon here.

This is where alphabetic writing emerged around the Mediterranean. Under the brilliant sun, scattered tribes nestled in different valleys would gather along the coast on calm, sunny days. Fallen trees floating in the sea became paths for them to meet. When they interacted, they discovered their written scripts were mutually unintelligible. So what did they do? They sought common ground. As Marx said, humans are the totality of social relations—we are social animals. To communicate, they extracted shared sounds: the five vowels—a, o, e, u, i. But that wasn’t enough. So consonants were added. That’s why alphabetic writing flourished along the Mediterranean coast, where trade and transportation have thrived since ancient times, making it the cradle of Western civilization.

But note this: every alphabetic system shares a common trait. A single letter alone carries no meaning. It must combine with prefixes, suffixes, or infixes. For example, “sun”—what does it mean? Before we define it, if you sit on “sun,” it could be a chair. Stand on “sun,” and it becomes the earth. Hang it in the sky, and it might represent the sun, moon, or stars. The oldest definition was “Apollo’s dwelling.” But is the sun still Apollo’s dwelling today? No. Its meaning must be reinterpreted through predicates.

In contrast, a single Chinese character is a world unto itself. As long as Chinese characters endure, our culture will remain unbroken—that’s the core idea. Now, let’s delve deeper: Why have Chinese characters persisted in China to this day?