This is an English translation of a story I wrote and published exactly 50 years ago. The original title, "樓外一章," translates literally to "A Chapter Beyond the Building."
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You set down your pen and notebook, slip out of Dorm Room 703 like a ghost, and start climbing the stairs toward the rooftop, where clothes hang drying in the sun.
“Maybe a shower first,” you mutter to yourself. “These heaps of English vocabulary words in Selected Readings are driving me mad!”
“Oh! What a beautiful sunset!” you exclaim, reaching the rooftop. Your gaze immediately catches the golden sunlight illuminating the fluttering "flags of the world." Outside this building, everything seems alive, vibrant, unexpectedly beautiful. You can’t help but feel a quiet thrill.
“Yes, it’s been so long since I last watched sunset. A view like this deserves to be savored.”
Instead of heading to the drying area, you walk straight to the edge of the rooftop. Leaning over the concrete railing, you let your eyes race across the horizon, sweeping from one edge of the sky to the other.
The evening breeze is cool yet passionately embraces your face and hair.
From this rooftop, your view stretches so far. Below lies a gray, weathered wall, battered by years of wind, rain, and sun. Beyond it, a narrow railroad snakes toward Alishan. Across the tracks stands an unfinished building. In the distance, vast green fields are dotted with a few scattered thatched cottages... And farther still, the faint silhouette of a low-lying mountain ridge—so low it nearly sinks beneath the horizon…
Everything looks different now! You sense keenly that these things aren’t the same as they once were. “But if you asked me to describe how, I don’t think I could,” you muse. As you lift your gaze, you find the sky teeming with clouds, each one adorned by the setting sun in a vivid array of colors.
“It’s not the sky I remember anymore—not pale and washed out like before.”
Lowering your head, your gaze falls again upon the narrow railway leading to Alishan. Some fellow once remarked, “Five years in Chiayi, and not a single trip to Alishan. What a shame!” You agreed at the time, but looking back now, the thought amuses you. Lately, you’ve hardly felt like even stepping outside this building. Talk of climbing Alishan? A joke!
The railroad stretches endlessly in both directions, disappearing into the unknown.
“Maybe it’s a metaphor for life…” The words slip out as you begin reflecting on that period when you were trapped within yourself, held captive by regrets you still don’t fully understand. How did you become so utterly “one of the building’s own,” so filled with suspicion, frustration, and misunderstanding of the outside world?
“Ridiculous!” you remember that gloomy time. “Why on earth did I start seeing utility poles as relics and eucalyptus trees as symbols of weariness? Why was I so negative? Absurd! Absolutely shameful!”
If only you could kick that memory away, grind it into dust and fling it far from yourself.
Then you suddenly recall the letter she sent you from the “City of Culture,” along with that article, Recipe—All Your Wishes Fulfilled. Indeed, she wrote, “As it says in Recipe—All Your Wishes Fulfilled: ‘…to sweeten our lives, we need to add a teaspoon of good cheer, a dash of humor, a pinch of whimsy, a generous sprinkling of play, and a full cup of joy…’”
She’s such an optimistic girl. Her article, Recipe—All Your Wishes Fulfilled, was supposedly copied from The Standard. Her positivity only highlights how different you are. But lately, you’ve learned a thing or two as well. You’ve learned to cultivate a cheerful state of mind and a more motivated spirit.
“I’m someone who has a little building but can still step out whenever I please,” you declare inwardly. Charging toward the sunset, which is now fading from gold to red, you glance back and see the “flags of the world” still fluttering.
Looking at those “flags,” you remember you actually came up here to collect your clothes. But another, gentler name flashes through your mind: “Hall of Perfect Goodness.” Ah, yes—this dormitory you stand on is called “The Hall of Perfect Goodness.” That’s meant to signify reaching the highest state of perfection. Yet, to truly reach that ideal, wouldn’t you need to step beyond the confines of this building? Now you see it more clearly: beyond the building, there are rivers, woods, all the beauty of nature.
“When I’m trapped inside this building, my view of the outside world is narrow. With only those few small windows, what could I really see?… Either I mistake utility poles and eucalyptus trees for emblems of antiquity and fatigue, or I misinterpret the sunlight as 'an unattainable beauty.' How pitiful!”
Truthfully, this longing to go beyond the building isn’t new to you. Back then, didn’t you dream of breaking free, shaking off your worries?—You’d long wanted to open yourself up, to reach out to some truly great minds. You used to feel ashamed of your limited knowledge, so several times you went out and bought stacks of books—novels, essays, biographies—many of them translations, hoping to grow and enrich yourself through them.
And for those great musicians, artists, even the renowned writers of this age, you wanted to know each name, to understand each one, and remember them all. Names like the musical prodigy Mozart, the poet of the piano Chopin, the pioneer of German Romantic opera Weber… the Renaissance masters, and all the classics, the Romantics, the Realists, the Impressionists… and movements like Dadaism, Surrealism, and so on.
“Oh, how absurd!” you laugh to yourself, remembering how during that time, maybe out of curiosity, maybe out of vanity, you spent days and nights studying famous paintings, listening to famous compositions, reading famous works. You thought this could free you from your “narrow building” and make you noble. But it didn’t.
“Of course, it’s only natural,” you reason with yourself. “For someone confined within a building to sense the vastness of the world outside, it’s inevitable they’d feel small. So who can blame me for becoming utterly ‘one of the building’s own,’ lamenting my confinement day after day?”
“Though, perhaps that’s not entirely true…”
Lost in thought, you remember another amusing incident. Your old classmate Zhen once wrote, “Among our little group of ‘characters,’ you’re definitely the most mysterious. Teacher Liao even said you’re the most mysterious, and have the deepest ‘wisdom’…” Zhen also mentioned he’d recently seen an article you’d written in the paper and felt a rush of excitement; he was deeply moved by it. But he lamented how he seldom reads newspapers or magazines in his “own little world,” or he might’ve shared more of your joys and sorrows!
Only heaven knows how many times you’ve submitted pieces for publication. To put it nicely: you lack that cheerful, bold demeanor that allows you to openly reveal yourself to others. To put it bluntly: there’s always an invisible wall between you and other people. Ah!
“But there’s nothing to be done. I could never be a writer. Writing just doesn’t suit me. Coming from a family of generations of farmers, I feel like I’ll always be one of Shennong’s children…”
“What nonsense! Bah!” You suddenly resist, defying yourself. You have such a knack for rationalizing everything about yourself. It’s truly your greatest flaw. You need to shake off this ridiculous thinking as soon as possible. Not only that, you ought to step out of this narrow building again, and search far and wide for your passions!
Yes! You’ve already started making progress. Just the other night, you “volunteered” to attend a performance of German Opera at the Provincial Chiayi High School.
“Without translation,” you’d told yourself before setting out, “the opera is so hard for me to understand, but I want to expand my horizons. I’ll rely on the actors’ expressions to capture something, to glimpse the beauty and truth of the world beyond!”
And so you joined the crowd. You shyly called this experience “a blind man watching an opera”; yet in reality, you were less clumsy than you imagined, and The Marriage of Figaro and Der Freischütz [NOTE] truly moved this child of Shennong deeply. Ah! Especially during Der Freischütz, when Max ventures to Wolf’s Glen at midnight to forge magic bullets, you were completely entranced. In the future, when you return to your home in the mountains, facing towering cliffs and wild forests, these “images” will bring you new, mysterious fantasies!
Oh, home, beyond those distant mountains! As you gaze into the fading light, you can barely make out the outline of the hills—their peaks almost swallowed by the horizon. The horizon has already devoured half the sun. “Maybe it’s time for that shower now,” you say, as if waking from a dream, turning toward the drying area. By now, the “flags of the world” are no longer fluttering as before.
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NOTE: To celebrate the German Opera Film Festival, recordings of these two operas were screened at the Provincial Chiayi High School auditorium on the night of March 14, 1974, free to the public.
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相關文章 (See also)：
1) 褲子及其他 (2010; orginally, 1974)
2) 樓外一章 (2010; originally, 1974)
3) 愛是什麼 (2010; originally, 1974)
4) 有感 (2010; originally, 1975)
5) ＯＯ (2010; orginally, 1985)
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