The Diary of Anne Ku
16 August 2000 Wednesday light, occasional rain
LESS IS MORE
Anyone who has studied Taoism would realise that life is a paradox. In fact, it's the paradoxes that have perplexed me the most as I was growing up.
One of my classmates had written in my high school year book:"All that glitters is not gold...." This reflects the temptation that "grass is greener on the other side." Only after you've been to the other side, only after you've touched all that glitters, do you realise that grass is not greener or gold.
When I initially started building this web site, I just wanted to pour more and more stuff into it. I tweaked the colours, the fonts, the size, the shape. Now I look at what I've done and wished that I had followed a more minimalistic route.
Building this web site paralleled getting comfortable in my house. I changed the windows, the doors, the colours, and just about everything I could change. It still gets easily cluttered despite having gotten over my shopaholicism years ago. This process of getting rid of things in pursuit of "less is more" also parallels my personal development. Letting go, saying goodbye, forgetting, .... closing the chapters in my life..
In exhibitions showing an artist's work from the beginning to the end of his / her life, I have seen how the strokes become more controlled towards the end. Yet the paintings become simpler. Does simplicity thus reflect "less is more"?
My sister sketched my mood - making me older than I looked in 1998. I had no idea what the next two years would bring.
From my father 16 Aug:
Reading your diary, I feel very close to you. It seems as if I were accompanying you en route to the rendezvous of yours and your friends. When you feel frustrated, worrying about being behind schedule for one reason or another and regretting that your friends will be wasting time waiting for you, I feel the same. Your description of your sentiments about the gang of four, your thoughts about various topics and what you had on your mind when you restored the feeling of your tranquil and familiar atmosphere inside your residence, etc, etc quite touch my inner mind. In a way it seems as though I had also experienced everything you felt. But of course, this is impossible. Your world is a different one, full of live spirit. Mine is a world of the elderly. Is there any corner of London's media, which can let you express your views, including social injustice? I read some articles in Chinese written by Dr. Pan, which were first published in newspapers here and then reprint on her web. They point out some pressing problems in society here. So can you, as an intellectual, scholar, and resident in U.K.