The books on the top shelf
I first encountered the phrases 'Golden Age' and 'Silver Age' through Wang Xiaobo's books. In high school I was wandering through a shabby Xinhua Bookstore in my small town when I saw, on the top shelf in a corner, several books called The Golden Age, The Silver Age, and The Bronze Age. Curious, I moved closer. The author was Wang Xiaobo.
I knew almost nothing about him. In fact, the first time I saw his name was on the title page of a pirated anthology of Yu Jie, where a line described Yu Jie as 'Beida's second Wang Xiaobo, mainland China's first Li Ao.' Since I liked Yu Jie, I probably should have pulled those books down and read them seriously. But when I flipped through them, I realized they were all fiction, and my interest faded. That was not surprising. People born in the 1980s were rarely eager to read about the Cultural Revolution and the years before it, and I had my own prejudices about fiction. Novels, as I saw it, were for patient people. If your patience is thin, stay away from thick novels—martial arts fiction and a few stories by Lu Xun excepted.
I never read those books, but the titles stayed with me. 'Age' is a word loaded with social and human meaning; to pair it with gold, silver, and bronze was enough to set off associations. But associations were all I had. I had no idea what those labels originally meant.
Recently I have been staying at home, pulling books off the shelves at random to pass the time and wipe away the dust. This morning I skimmed Greek Myths, and finally understood. A knot that had been with me for years came loose.
The book, as its name suggests, contains stories from ancient Greece. These myths grew in ancient times, circulated among ordinary people for centuries, and were later collected and arranged by the nineteenth-century German poet Schwab. The surface is a set of stories about Greek gods, but they still carry a warning. The Bible continues to exercise cultural and moral influence in the present; these myths do something similar. What interested me most was the way the book defines the ages of humanity.
Five ages
The chapters are arranged as separate stories. The second chapter is called 'The Ages of Humanity.' Its prose is plain, almost flat, yet it still hits hard. In the account given there, human history is divided into five ages: gold, silver, bronze, the age of the demigods, and iron. The sequence runs from gold to iron, from best to worst, and each age has its own character.
In the golden age, people lived like gods. They were free from care, from heavy labor, from grief and poverty. They worked in peace, hardly aged, and when death came it was like sinking into a calm sleep.
In the silver age, children were pampered at home, kept in childhood for a hundred years by their mothers' care, mentally immature. When they finally became adults, only a few years were left to them. They could not restrain their violent emotions, and their reckless behavior dragged them into misery. They cheated one another, broke laws without shame, and stopped sacrificing to the gods.
The bronze age produced a different kind of people: cruel and violent, devoted to war, always killing one another. Each person tried every means to humiliate others. They ate the flesh of animals and would not eat the fruits of the field. They were huge and terrifying, but they could not resist death.
The age of the demigods came next. These people were supposed to be nobler and more just than those before them, and they lived on fertile earth. In the end, though, they too fell into war and blood feud.
Then came the iron age. The ancient poet quoted in the text laments: If only I had not been born in the fifth generation of humanity, if only I had died earlier or been born later. This is the iron race. They are utterly corrupted, full of pain and sin. They worry day and night and never find peace. The gods keep adding new troubles, but the greatest troubles are the ones they bring on themselves.
The poet goes on. Fathers oppose sons; sons hate fathers. Guests hate the friends who host them; friends hate one another. The world is full of resentment. Even brothers no longer meet with the openness and affection of the past. White-haired parents receive no pity or respect; old people are abused. 'Unfeeling humanity,' the poet says, 'how could you forget the judgment of the gods and ignore all that your parents gave you?' Power wins everywhere. Fraud runs wild. People scheme to destroy one another's cities and villages. The honest, the kind, and the just are trampled down; swindlers prosper and are honored. Rights and restraint are no longer respected. The wicked insult the good, lie, and manufacture trouble through slander. This, in fact, is why these people are so unhappy. The goddess of goodness and dignity once walked the earth; now she wraps her beautiful body in white and leaves in sorrow, returning to the eternal world of the gods. What remains for humanity is despair and pain, with no hope at all.
When I read this, I looked calm on the outside, but inside I was shaken. Words left by people thousands of years ago described the present with such accuracy that I felt as if I had walked through a tunnel in time and seen a prophecy fulfilled. But I quickly pulled myself back, because the translator's afterword makes a sensible point: humanity has reason to be proud of centuries of social progress and scientific achievement. People know that the gods do not exist, but myths that reflect history, culture, and the human spirit are beautiful and lasting.
From that angle, the book is not a prophetic scripture. Like the Bible, it is a human work. It borrows the voices of gods and heroes to reflect the particular conditions of a particular people and their spiritual life. So why does it still hit a reader so hard? I think the main reason is recognition.
The buoy and the brick
Civilization, as I understand it, has two faces: material and spiritual. With the passage of history, human experience in creating material things can accumulate. That makes material civilization an irreversible process, a movement from lower to higher levels. The level of material production can only rise, not fall back, so the material civilization humanity finally creates will inevitably be the most splendid.
Spiritual civilization is not like that. Thousands of years of history show that the human spiritual world can advance, retreat, and repeat itself. I would even compare it to a buoy tied to a brick in water. The buoy rises and falls with the waves. It looks as if it is moving all the time, but in substance it only bobs up and down; gravity keeps it from shifting position. When the buoy is at its highest point, spiritual civilization has briefly reached a height. When it is at its lowest, spiritual civilization has suffered a severe blow. War and changes in social systems are the two main causes of the disappearance, or temporary collapse, of spiritual civilization. Spiritual progress is extremely difficult. It is like dragging a brick against gravity; the cost and the time required are easy to imagine. Worse, the buoy may one day break at its lowest point because it cannot bear the weight. That possibility is very real.
Material and spiritual development do not support each other. Material development even restrains the spirit. 'A full belly leads to lust,' and countless historical examples tell us that when the material world is richest and most prosperous, the human spiritual world is often a barren waste.
If I pay attention, the age we live in resembles the old myth with shocking exactness. The moral features revealed in social news are no different from the descriptions left by the ancients. There are complete people from the golden age among us, but there are more people from the silver and bronze ages, and from the hopeless iron age. Our age is a contradiction: extreme material wealth on one side, extreme spiritual loss on the other.
I once wrote on a forum: 'We eat our fill, but spiritually we are hungry. We hold steel guns but have lost the prey—the beloved white bird. We hold fine paper and pens but cannot write a line describing the sunset. Since suffering has not been recognized and love has not been learned, this age should be the best of times and the worst of times.' I still have reason to hold to that view.
What kind of age is ours? I think it is the best of times and the worst of times.
