Acknowledgements
Preface

1 Seeing Nature and the Cities
2 The Reading Self

Works Cited

 

序

　　【Acknowledgements】

　　I want to thank Mr. Michael Song, the President of Showwe Publisher (Taipei, Taiwan), for his encouragement and his thoughtfulness. My thanks also go to Irene Cheng and Lestat Yin for making this book possible.

　　【Preface】

　　The initial idea of writing such a book on the condition of language comes from a question, which was asked by Jean-Paul Sartre in his book, What is Literature? In fact, Sartre truly wanted to ask himself and the readers, this essential question - 'What is Writing'?

　　In Sartre's Words, again, he mentioned the way in which Charles Schweitzer was 'amazed' (Sartre 89) by the French language. In some ways, Schweitzer did not consider himself 'as a writer' - he 'played' with the language, and yet, 'had not quite made it his own' (Sartre 89).

　　Sartre's words indicate that to write in a specific language - as a writer - firstly one has to feel and to appreciate the sophistication of that particular language. Secondly, one needs to make this language his or her own, in order to make it alive in a written form.

　　Literature is not all about a play of a language, or a linguistic game. The written pages are not only a representation of the black and the white; the verbal and the visual. A writer somehow does not only write a book. He or she - most importantly - lives a book. The text itself does not only represent the condition of language - rather, it does represent the condition of one's own self.