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How To Create
The writer I admire most of that period is Chekov. And it is that he brought something new to literature…
In Chekov’s works…there is no approach or node or outcome, and no climax is being prepared; the action is continuous, because life flows in and out of the stage without resolving anything: we have the feeling that all the characters they lived before the play and will continue to live equally dramatically after.
— James Joyce
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Don’t ever force a lock; you’ll bend the key or break the lock. You jiggle until it revolves. So, Wúwéi is to act in accordance with the pattern of things as they exist, not to impose on any situation a kind of interference that is not in accordance with the situation…
For example, we have a slum, and the people are in difficulty, and they need better housing. Now, if you go in with a bulldozer and knock the slum down, and you put in its place by some architect’s imaginative notions of what is a super-efficient highrise apartment building to store people, you create a total mess. Utter chaos. A slum has what we would call an ecology. It has a very complex system of relationships going in it by which the thing is already a going concern, even though it isn’t going very well. Anybody who wants to alter that situation must first of all become sensitive to all the conditions and relationships…
