Eric Tian

One of the most famous scenes in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables involves a criminal and a bishop.

Jean Valjean is an ex-convict who has recently been released from prison. His crime: stealing bread for his sister and her seven starving children. He was imprisoned 19 years in total, five for the initial robbery and an additional 14 for multiple attempts to escape. When he is finally released, the prison gives him less money than he’s owed. When he tries to find work, his bosses pay him less than others because he is a former convict. Confusion leads to frustration which leads to bitterness, and Valjean begins to lose all faith in humanity. As Hugo describes:

“He is lost between the infinites of sea and sky, the one a tomb, the other a shroud. Darkness is falling. He has swum for hours until his strength is at an end and the ship with its company of men has long since passed from sight. Solitary in the huge gulf of twilight he twists and turns, feeling the waves of the unknowable close in upon him. And for the last time he calls, but not to man. Where is God?”

One night, the ex-convict stumbles across a Bishop’s home. Unlike the various inns Valjean has been rejected from, the Bishop takes in the tired, broken man and lets him stay the night. The ex-convict can hardly believe the hospitality being shown to him.

Despite this, while the Bishop is sleeping that night, Valjean decides to steal silverware cutlery from the very person that showed him compassion and escapes through the garden. The following excerpt is what happened the morning after (lightly edited for clarity):

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A knock sounded on the door and the bishop called, ‘Come in!’
The door opened to disclose a dramatic group. Three men were holding a fourth by the arms and neck. The three were soldiers; the fourth was Jean Valjean.
A sergeant of the soldiers, who had been standing by the door and was evidently in charge of the party, entered the room and saluted.
‘Monseigneur –’ he began.
At this Valjean, who was looking crushed and woebegone, raised his head in stupefaction.
The Bishop was meanwhile coming towards them as rapidly as his age allowed.
‘So here you are!’ he cried to Valjean. ‘I’m delighted to see you. Had you forgotten that I gave you the candlesticks as well? They’re silver like the rest, and worth a good two hundred francs. Did you forget to take them?’
Jean Valjean’s eyes had widened. He was now staring at the old man with an expression no words can convey.
‘Monseigneur,’ said the sergeant, ‘do I understand this man was telling the truth? When we saw him he seemed to be on the run, and we thought we had better make sure. We found this silver in his knapsack and –’
‘And he told you,’ said the bishop, smiling, ‘that it had been given by an old priest with whom he stopped the night. I can see how it is. You felt bound to bring him here, but you were mistaken.’
‘You mean,’ said the sergeant, ‘that we can let him go?’
‘Certainly.’
The soldiers released Valjean, who seemed to cringe. ‘Am I really allowed to go?’ he said, mumbling the words as if he were talking in his sleep.
‘You heard, didn’t you?’ said a soldier.
‘But this time,’ said the bishop, ‘you must not forget your candlesticks.’
He fetched them from the mantelpiece and handed them to Valjean. The two women watched him do so without seeking by word or look to interfere. Valjean was trembling. He took the candlesticks mechanically and with a distracted air.
‘And now,’ said the bishop, ‘go in peace. Incidentally, my friend, when you next come here you need not go through the garden. This door is never locked.’ He turned to the soldiers. ‘Thank you, gentlemen.’
The soldiers withdrew. Valjean stayed motionless as through he were on the verge of collapse.

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Later on in Les Misérables, we see that the Bishop’s act of grace becomes a major turning point for Valjean. I won’t go into the details due to spoilers, but his transformation is quite incredible – would definitely recommend a read.

This interaction can be interpreted any number of ways, ranging from the religious to the historical. Valjean’s redemption echoes that of the Parable of the Lost Son in scripture (Luke 15:11-32) but also points to a simple but powerful moral: forgiveness.

Amidst the giant, chaotic storm of life, small acts of charity can be easily seen as worthless. But Valjean’s redemption is a wonderful reminder that we can never know how much our actions mean to others. The bishop could’ve had Valjean thrown back into prison for fear of being robbed again, but in this small act of mercy the ex-convict began a new life to do some remarkable things.

Books can be mirrors for ourselves, but they can also be constellations of who we could be if we tried. Les Mis is a wonderful reminder to wave the flag of radical forgiveness – a trait I wish I had more of – and to be comfortable knowing that simple acts of kindness could do nothing at all, or change another’s life for the better.

The following excerpt is from Austin Kleon’s Keep Going, a book that is quickly turning into an absolute treasure.

“Creativity is about connection – you must be connected to others in order to be inspired to share your own work – but it is also about disconnection. You must retreat from the world long enough to think, practice your art, and bring forth something worth sharing with others. You must play a little hide-and-seek in order to produce something worth being found.

Silence and solitude are crucial.”

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In my experience, the potency of the internet to annihilate a creative bubble is dangerously great. It seeps in like a virus, seeking to wreck havoc amongst a delicate, creative space. To create something meaningful, disconnection with the world is just as important as connection with the world.

In particular, I’ve found that how I spend the first hour of your day is a pretty good indicator of how the rest of the day will go. If I scroll Facebook as soon as I wake up, my brain becomes ‘primed’ to seek instant gratification activities for the rest of the day. On these days, almost no productive work – and certainly no creative work – gets done at all. The saddest part of it is, there is almost no benefit to checking my devices when upon waking. As Austin puts it,

“There’s almost nothing in the news that any of us need to read in the first hour of the day. When you reach for your phone or your laptop upon waking, you’re immediately inviting anxiety and chaos into your life. You’re also bidding adieu to some of the most potentially fertile moments in the life of a creative person.”

And so the solution to a creative space is to frantically defend your inputs. To find a “bliss station”: a time or place where you can just be alone with yourself and to free yourself from any distractions. For me, that’s the first 30 minutes of the day. I get up, make my bed, drink some water, pee and sit down to journal my morning pages (drinking tea is optional). Devices are absolutely prohibited. This time is defended obsessively, like how I would treat an exam or a job interview. It sounds neurotic but if this bliss station is defended sufficiently, I consistently emerge a better person – both to myself with my work, and to others with being more present.

You can be woke without waking up to the news.

Austin Kleon, Keep Going

The following contains excerpts of my journal over the last 24 hours and has some fairly chaotic, messy ramblings – please enjoy.

Wed, 15^th July 6:53pm

Okay, I screwed up. Felt pretty tired after my lunch at 2pm so decided to take a 15 minute nap. Thought the alarm was set for 2:23pm but turns out I set it at 2:23AM. Ended up waking just now.

You’d think the occasional long nap would be awesome: you’re fully recovered from the morning’s activities and can now turn your attention to the evening’s agenda. Right? WRONG. When you wake up from an unnaturally extended slumber, the first instinct that hits you is panic. You’ve done this before and you know what it’s like. Indeed, you may feel refreshed for a split second but as soon as you think of the night to come, you are filled with dread. When you lay down to sleep at your normal bedtime, sleep will evade you. You beg for it to come but it ignores your pleas. Out of desperation, you go knocking on sleep’s door but sleep isn’t in. There’s only a sign on the door that says, “Oops, looks like sleep’s taking some time off – he’ll visit you in a few hours!”

Those hours can be unpredictable – frustrating at best, dark and demoralising at worst. I think I’m a pretty good mental state right now so I doubt an existential crisis will be waiting for me, but the problem goes beyond those hours spent wide awake. Your next day is ruined as well. You show up for certain activities – classes, meetings and what not – but you’re not really there. You’re more like a shell, like a part of your consciousness has been severed from you. Anyway, I should start catching up on my afternoon’s schedule. Will probably check-in again at a disgusting hour.

Thurs, 16^th July 3:23am

It begins. I’m actually so alert right now it’s not even funny. I tried reading a book but my head is like a jar of countless fireflies colliding with each other and it’s hard to focus on anything at one time. So I thought it might be good to record down some of these thoughts swimming around in my head. Here goes…

Who the heck named the zebra? What a bizarre name…

The Christian gospel is actually the most extraordinary story of love ever. If someone made a movie remake of the gospel in a modern setting (old, wholesome grandpa dying for a bratty child etc.), I reckon it’d be a hit. Not sure how politically correct that would be though.

Not sure how I feel about passive nihilism. On one hand, the philosophy seems liberating in that if you seriously believe nothing matters, you aren’t held back as much by fear of failure or disappointing people. On the other hand, it can lead to some pretty dark existential crises. Trying to create meaning in a world you don’t believe has one sounds terribly exhausting.

I should really clean my room.

Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever baked a cake myself before. I see people doing it on Instagram a lot and it seems pretty fun and not too expensive. Could be worth a try one of these days.

Adobe Premiere Pro keeps crashing on me, should I switch video editing apps? Getting pretty tired of trying fixes that don’t work.

Maybe if I shower I’ll get tired. I don’t want to wake my housemate though. But surely he’s sleeping, right? Wait, I just realised I didn’t shower tonight. No wonder my armpits stink. Okay, I’ll go for a shower.

4:20am

Well, I’m clean and feeling sleepier now. Hair’s still a bit wet but we’ll cop it. Made sure I set the alarm for 8:30am, NOT pm. Might try and see if sleep will pay me a visit now.

8:43am

Holy cow, yesterday’s nap was so dumb. Got 3 hours of zoom calls ahead of me and I feel like I’ve been hit by a train. Can I go to hospital for this? Probably not… Anyway, if there’s one takeaway from this experience it’s that I should really pay attention when setting my alarm. Those 5 seconds can really make or break the next few days. Long naps really suck. Think I had a dream about two cats falling in love by the beach though, that was pretty cool.

A few weeks ago, I realised the books in my room resembled the aftermath of a warzone. So out of pure necessity, I tidied up my bookshelf which now looks like this:

Still kind of messy, but much more accessible and aesthetically acceptable. However, there’s a problem: with my bookshelf now clean, I’m chronically exposed to books that just beg to be read. Some books have been recommended to no end (e.g. Sapiens), some tickle my curiosity (e.g. Antifragile), some are just fun reads I like to revisit (e.g. The Little Prince) and some are books I’ve promised to read but haven’t gotten around to yet. It seems like a great luxury to have all these options, but to be honest, seeing all these books stare at me is paralysing. A little pang of guilt hits me every time I glance towards my bookshelf, knowing that there’s so much to learn but not much time.

Of course, this is a trivial and first-world problem to have – having more books at your disposal is better than fewer, right? Well… maybe not. Recently, I saw a Ted Talk called The Paradox of Choice | Barry Schwartz which, as you can probably guess, explores the paradox of choice. According to Prof Schwartz, an American psychologist, there are four reasons why choice makes one miserable, despite it being designed to improve welfare:

1. Decision paralysis (So many choices, what to choose?)
2. Reduced satisfaction (So many choices, they’re all pretty good, none will blow me away…)
3. Escalation of expectations (So many choices, the best better be worth it!)
4. Self-blame (So many choices, did I choose the right one?)

Prof Schwartz does admit that in some circumstances, having choices can be a luxury and is beneficial. For developing countries, the ability to choose between locations of clean water is a fantastic problem to have. Yet, for most of us in the developed world, he argues there is a severe excess of choice and this is, without question, harming us.

What to do then? The natural answer seems simply to remove the burden of choice from our lives. But is throwing out my bookshelf, deleting some phone apps and donating half my clothes really necessary? In some instances, perhaps. For me, that’s where ad-blockers come in, for inhibiting binges on Chess.com and YouTube via desktop. (On a side note, bullet chess – chess with a 1 minute time limit – is a dark and dangerous hole, don’t go down there).

But the true antidote to this decision paradox seems to require a change on the internal, rather than external environment. Change such as the ability to focus on a task at hand and ignore competing distractions. To respect oneself enough to complete a task at hand to brilliance. To be less bothered by material things. To be grateful. The dangers of choice are abundant and can be deeply paralysing, but it is in one’s control to determine whether they let these perils seep into their lives.

With today marking the start of a six-week lockdown, I’ve been thinking about ways to best use the time freed up from no clinical placements or social outings. One question that comes to mind is, “Should I prioritise being productive, or on becoming a better character?” I know it sounds like a strange question – surely the two are mutually related – but what I mean is whether I should focus on my outputs (improving productivity) or my inputs (improving character) with this time.

Growing up, I often fetishised productivity. If I had 100 points to spend on either being productive or being interesting, I’d invest all 100 in being productive. It might’ve been an Asian millennial/Gen Z thing, but spending more time doing the same task always seemed absurd to me. Life is so grand and there is so much to accomplish, why waste your time like that?

Yet, I’m beginning to rethink this notion. It seems that getting stuck in the fast lane comes with a certain level of tunnel-vision – a myopia of sorts. When going fast, it’s so easy to get lost, that one forgets why they even started.  

As usual, literature provided a valuable insight into this dilemma. Thanks to a friend’s recommendation, I’ve recently started reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (Norman Denny translation) and found a highlight in my notes that spoke to this idea. In the following excerpt, Victor Hugo describes the garden of the Bishop Myriel. Mme Magloire is the domestic servant to the bishop.

“…The paths enclosed four square plots bordered with box. Mme Magloire once said teasingly to him: ‘Monseigneur, you believe in making use of everything, but this fourth plot is wasted. Salads are more useful than flowers’. ‘You are wrong,’ replied the bishop. ‘The beautiful is as useful as the useful.’ Then, after a pause, he added: ‘More so, perhaps.’”

I found this a great reminder to slow down. To allow one to indulge in something that lets the soul jiggle and delight, despite being useless from a productivity standpoint. For although a flower might not be as nutritious or ‘useful’ as a kale plant, its real value comes from something far deeper and gentler: the splendid ability to light up the heart.

Last night, I came across this article by Tim Ferriss called Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide, which goes into the author’s experience with depression and his close encounter with taking his own life. I’m personally a big fan of the writer – he has a podcast called The Tim Ferriss Show which I’ve gained many insights from – so reading this article and imagining a world where he didn’t exist was unsettling.

I’d recommend reading the whole post, but there’s a moment that stuck out to me where Tim reflects on his experience, 16 years later:

“Now, at this point, some of you might also be thinking “That’s it?! A Princeton student was at risk of getting a bad grade? Boo-fuckin’-hoo, man. Give me a break…”

But… that’s the entire point. It’s easy to blow things out of proportion, to get lost in the story you tell yourself, and to think that your entire life hinges on one thing you’ll barely remember 5-10 years later. That seemingly all-important thing could be a bad grade, getting into college, a relationship, a divorce, getting fired, or just a bunch of hecklers on the Internet.”

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Fear. A powerful, primitive and potentially pernicious emotion. Whilst undoubtedly necessary to our survival, in the modern age I sometimes wonder if evolution has done us a disfavour by ingraining such visceral responses of fear against uncertain times. In Tim’s case, fear drove him to a state where he seriously considered taking his own life, which was, as he admitted, an irrational decision. And given suicide is the one of the leading causes of death for young people, I doubt he’s alone in this experience. Hence, I decided to take some time to learn about fear in order to understand some of the ancient tendencies hidden within our biology.

Later that night, I was going over my Notion book highlights and came across this fantastic chapter in Life of Pi on the nature of fear. It comes at a time where Pi has been stranded on the lifeboat for a long time and is losing hope of ever being rescued. The following excerpt is a bit long, but I find it beautifully written and deeply profound so I’ll share it here to end.

“I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.

Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.”

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For anyone reading that might be going through hardships, I’d just like to say: I want to see the gifts you have to offer the world. Speaking from personal experience, and from the testimony of others, this too shall pass – whatever it is. Stay strong and seek help if you require.

Disclaimer: Spoilers for The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery ahead. If you haven’t read this beautiful novella, you can find it online for free here.

One of my favourite scenes in The Little Prince is where the little prince realises a rose on his home planet looks just like an ordinary rose on Earth. This realisation throws the prince into turmoil, and forces him to re-examine his worth.

Then he went on with his thoughts: ‘I used to think myself rich, with a flower that was unique; but all I had was a common rose… which does not make me a great prince’. And, lying down in the grass, he began to cry.

Shortly after, a fox appears and the two become quite close. Over the course of their friendship, the prince slowly comes to realise that his rose was unique, after all. That there was something special about the emotion and time spent getting to know his rose, thus making it his special flower. And so, in a critical moment of the story, the little prince addresses the roses on Earth:

‘You are beautiful, but you are empty’, he went on. ‘One could not die for you. Of course, an ordinary passer-by would think my rose looked just like you. But in herself she matters more than all of you together, since it is she that I watered; since it is she that I placed under the glass dome; since it is she that I sheltered with the screen; since it is she… that I listened to, when she complained, or boasted, or when she was simply being silent. Since it is she who is my rose.’

To echo this sentiment, the fox gives a parting remark to the little prince, in what is the novella’s most famous line:

‘Goodbye,’ said the fox. ‘Now here is my secret, very simply: you can only see things clearly with your heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.’

There have been many essays and analyses on this quote, but to me it reveals a simple but powerful moral: that often, things are more complex than they seem. To really get to know something – a person, a fox or even a plant – requires a degree of looking past the superficial. And this is tough, for humans, animals or plants look similar and behave in (mostly) predictable ways. To truly understand one’s character requires a searching and feeling beneath the surface, which is often invisible to the eye.