06英语2班 梁永豪 200630451344

The Importance of Living is Lin’s first book published after he devoted himself on writing in America, which is also another success after his book My Country My People. Published in 1937 in America, The Importance of Living has been on the list of American best sellers for 52 weeks in 1938. And it was republished for forty times and even translated into dozen languages. In his book, Lin expresses the broad-minded and leisure ways of how Chinese people live. And through conveying the romance and grace of orient’s sentiment, Lin shows to westerners a worthy of imitation life norm to follow. In a word, Lin’s leisure philosophy has an important meaning of enlightenment to modern people’s lives.

In Lin’s opinion, leisure to life is of very importance, and he thinks that having a leisure and happy life is the essential of life. But few people get leisure because of their busy work. Not the essential of life as working as, for the busyness and annoyance from the so called work are not inborn, they come from the development of human society. In modern industrialized world, people are too busy to have a leisure life while this is not in accordance with the essential of our lives. In The Importance of Life the importance here means the wisdom and leisure philosophy of life. Lin expresses his idea in the method of prose. Though not a philosophy book as it is, Lin’s putting forward the idea of leisure life early in the 1930s could be a forward-looking pioneering work with profound meaning.

Leisure is very important, but through ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign, at all times and in all countries, not everyone can have a leisure life. There can exist the objective material reasons, but mainly are the reasons of humans’ subjective opinion to life that influence humans’ leisure live. In Lin’s opinion, what material elements to life are exterior, what really counts is humans’ attitude towards life. Lin thinks the old Chinese people are the best people good at leisure life, because their attitudes towards life are quite different from other peoples.

Lin thinks that if we want to live a happy life, first of all, we should treat people as people, treat the world as a world and see the whole world in a humanistic perspective. We belong to this world and can not be separated from it even one day. That does not mean that we shell see the world as a perfect place like paradise, and see people as perfect being like god. On the contrary, in Lin’s opinion, what makes human being charming is just their imperfectness. People always have defects. And the purely perfect people will make the life boring and dull. So Lin always sigh: the earthliness is real; the paradise is ethereal; and how lucky it is for human can live between the real earthliness and ethereal paradise.

As to how to live a leisure life, Lin thinks that leisure life should exist leisure in it. But Lin’s leisure is different from the leisure nowadays we talk about. Its meaning is much boarder. Usually, when we talk about leisure, we just mean leisure in time. But Lin’s leisure not only denotes leisure time, but also denotes leisure space. In fact, both leisure time and leisure space are very important to leisure life. Especially in modernized today, people can have a leisure time, but they still don’t feel leisure, for they live in a not leisure space. It is so crowed everywhere that their leisure space is badly compressed, so how could they feel leisure?

Besides, having leisure also includes leisure in emotion. Here, Lin does not thinks that the money and material things mean too much to leisure life. He illustrates us some examples that people who have a lot of money still have no leisure at all. On the contrary, in ancient China, there were lots of scholars who were even though out at the elbows, they could still have their leisure lives. From this, we can know that we should have a leisure emotional heart before we can enjoy our leisure lives. For Lin thinks that this leisure-enjoying emotion is a passion and love to life.

What’s more, Lin tells us that to enjoy a leisure life should be carefree enough. That requests us to not care too much about gain and loss, success and failure. Only treat the gain and loss of no account can we lighten our burden in heart, and finally get the leisure.

Above are the leisure philosophies I learn from Lin Yutang’ The Importance of Living. Surely Lin’s leisure philosophy towards life is much more meaningful and profound than I could conclude. This book includes the creams of Chinese leisure philosophy, having a eternal meaning in enlightening people’s lives. We can learn a lot from this book and guide ourselves to live better lives.