Chapter 68 monolithic face

Jesus said: Whoever seeks the meaning of his life will lose it. There is a person who looks at the huge human heads carved out of rocks on the mountain day after day, but he never thinks that one day he will be like them, or be carved on the huge rocks like them, he just passes by their feet , looking at it as if nothing had happened.One day, when he died, people went to see him and found that his face was as solemn and noble as the faces of those giant stone statues on the mountain. This is a thought-provoking story told by Hawthorne in his novel "The Face of the Stone Statue". We can regard the face of the giant stone statue as a symbol of the meaning of life, and the acquisition of the meaning of life is not intentional, but happens naturally.Jesus said: Anyone who seeks the meaning of his life will lose it, which is exactly what he meant, it is the paradox of life.If a person focuses too much on himself, the result is to lose himself. A person who sets out to pursue himself is often the one who begins to lose himself.

Only when we forget about ourselves and respond with our total self to someone or something outside of us can we have a self and our true uniqueness can emerge. The protagonist of Hawthorne's novel does not have a predetermined shape or goal for his self, he just immerses himself in it, contemplating the stone statues that fascinate him.He didn't intentionally want to be those stone statues, but unconsciously, his face already resembled those stone statues naturally. The self, like the meaning of life, cannot be invented by shutting the door and forgetting to eat and sleep, but by going out of the house and discovering it in the vast world.The so-called meaning is the interpretation of the relationship. The meaning of life always exists in the relationship between the individual and others, the individual and society, and the relationship between the individual and the universe, so it must be external to me.

The so-called meaning of self or life comes from the reflection of external people and things on oneself.From them, we can discover the meaning of our own life.