Because of insomnia, I woke up late, energy-drained. Noticing that it was already 7:49, I hurried to school, grasping for breath desperately after my arrival, only to find the blurred vision of everything around me - I forget to bring my glasses! Wondering why our body is so delicate that it needs to be recharged daily to keep one’s mind properly working, I began to prepare for the lessons, ironically not for school lessons, but for lessons of the imagination.
While I was trying to find some books, I noticed there was a round, yellow little thing standing in front of me, dragging my thoughts towards it strangely. Because of the blurred reality, I had no idea what it was. But according to Arthur Schopenhauer, the world of objects in space and time exists solely as representation dependent on a cognizing subject, not as a world that can be considered to exist in itself. One’s knowledge of objects is thus knowledge of mere phenomena rather than things-in-themselves. “What is the ‘phenomena’ of this round yellow little thing in front of me then?”, I whispered to myself and decided to find out the “truth”.
Round and yellow, it was perhaps the condensed setting sun behind “the sower”, painted by Van Gogh at Arles in 1888. The classroom was just like the field, and the teacher was the sower. While the sun was shining with an unearthly luminescence as the preacher of knowledge, the sower was walking around the field with great patience and hope, endeavoring to convey messages from the sun to the earth. Only sunlight was poured up, and the hand of the sower was pointing down. At the same time the seeds fell into the soil, and then after germination, new plants would appear. These plants then began to dream about being a sower and thus the messenger of the sun to earth. New beliefs were running upon the half-empty field, telling a fairy tale of wisdom and infinity, of the continuous revival of nature in the human imagination.
But when night falls, what would the sun become then? Maybe a twinkle star in the starry night. Van Gogh was always in love with the vast peacefulness and solemn majesty of the night sky; he once wrote, “The sight of the stars always makes me dream”. This time, the classroom was like the still town, magnifying the dramatic actions everywhere else. The hills were rolling. The cypresses flickered like flames. The sky flooded with soft swirls. The twinkle star was shedding gentle light, forming a bridge between the earth and heaven. All of this made me dream. I could feel that the everlasting energy of imagination and creation is flowing over me, setting me in a state of serenity and reverie.
However, was that really the truth I want? The separation line bewteen my consciousness and reality escaped nowhere. It seemed like the yellow round thing only lived in the representation of my will. While I was thinking about it, the bell rang and forced me back to the so called “real” reality. I stood up and walked to the round little thing, only to find that it was a bottle cap, standing silently on the desk. “Well, this time, perhaps it should be the door watcher of the liquor of the esoteric doctrines then.” I whispered to myself with a smile, waiting for the next adventure to begin.