Two talks yesterday helped me understand a little further my ambiguous relationship with an academic life. I’m deeply interested in the premises of both of the talks, but left both earlier with a little firmer belief that the decision I made a decade ago was right, more or less.

The key take-away from Paul Cohen’s book talk “A Path Twice Traveled: My Journey As A Historian of China” was nothing about China. I found his academic fixation on King Goujian an ultimate product of the pulling effect of the otherness, and the wide employment of this myth in understanding the Chinese psyche overstated, mildly speaking.

The comfort for my making effort to manage to sit there for more than an hour was, my belief that “there’s no history, only historians” was further confirmed by a professional historian. Historians, as he stated clearly, impose narratives (hence orderly patterns) on reality, which is in nature chaotic. There are no stories to begin with, and they’re constructed by narrative-driven human beings like us.

That’s not saying stories or narratives are not important — quite the opposite, they’re deadly important for us homosapians. We needed these mental structures to orientate us in our species’s very early days…to navigate the forests and mountains in order to locate the food! It’s literally a matter of life and death. However, they’re not the reality. They’re representations of the reality.

The other talk I got myself to yesterday — the cognitive neuroscience of translation — is also something fairly dear to my heart by nature, only to arrive there slightly turned off at the very beginning already by the lackluster looks of both the lecturer and the attendees. None of them seemed thrilled by what’s a deeply thrilling subject matter. I couldn’t tell at all how their studies actually enhanced their lives.

Again, the benefit stemmed from it further confirming a belief that eventually prompted me to drop out of my PhD study some ten years ago — social science research and experiment only confirm the commonsensical perception. You made a huge hassle data-gathering, model-building, writing dry papers and going through peer-reviews, only to prove your initial instinctive understanding.

For example, this Durham University scholar used lots of data to prove “eye fixation indicates AOI (area of interest)” for feck sake! (Note the pretentious acronym to enact an air of significance which would otherwise not exist). If I stared at something for more than 5 mins, I’d better to have some remote interest to justify my attention isn’t it?

Another example (more pretentious initials and acronyms to follow…): L1-L2 (source/mother language to target language) translation requires greater cognitive effort than L2-L1 translation. This is another open door being kicked — every English-speaking Chinese would perhaps know by experience it’s a lot harder to translate Chinese into English than the vice-versa, coz the destination language determines the level of difficulty.

It almost felt like a crime scene and the offense committed here was the killing of pleasure and joy. All those hideous phrases (“eye-tracker”, “galvanic skin response”, “functional magnetic resonance imaging”) served to murder an organic enjoyment every human being would have if not smothered by forceful imposition of importance in the name of science.

I felt quite wounded! While at the same time a secret, quiet sense of relief …