I wrote in my notes on my having lived in China that I hadn’t meet a real interesting expat. Thinking about this later, I recalled the best book I have read about the Chinese expat experience: On a Chinese Screen by W. Somerset Maugham, and a chapter in it entitled The Rolling Stone.
Here is the killer excerpt:
“The civilised world irked him and he had a passion to get away from the beaten trail. The oddities of life amused him. He had an insatiable curiosity. But I think his experiences were merely of the body and were never translated into experiences of the soul. Perhaps that is why at bottom you felt he was commonplace. The insignificance of his mien was a true index to the insignificance of his soul. Behind the blank wall was blankness.”
I’ve meet so many of this type.
Reading that passage, I find myself wanting to recite the Rosary. I got to work on my soul because my physical experiences have been minimal and nothing to boast about.
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