From “I Am Not Jessica” by Ann Liang:
“That old saying floats across my mind again. To dream of becoming a butterfly. I’ve been busy deliberating why the dream started, but I’m not so sure if I am ready for the dream to end. Would the butterfly be relieved to turn back into a human? Or would the butterfly miss being able to fly too much?”
“Dreaming of becoming a butterfly” as a theme appears throughout the book, a unique interpretation of the “body swap” trope. It originates from Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou (also known as Zhuangzi), who most famously wrote in his book (also titled Zhuangzi) that he had dreamed of being a butterfly. As he woke up, he wondered whether it was he as a human dreaming of becoming a butterfly, or it was he as a butterfly dreaming of becoming a human. He then wrote: “There must be some distinction between the human and the butterfly, and that is called the ‘Transformation of Things’.”
But no one gets to ask the butterfly itself, right? Would a butterfly even want to become a human in the first place? We are so used to evaluating and judging everything from our own point of view.
The image comes from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuangzi_(book).
(Day 35 #WarmWinterRead #WWR25 via @librarieschangelives)
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 