The woman in the blue coat considered the painting before her. It was gray ink mostly, shot through with a tint of green, maybe, though that could be just an effect of the lighting above; it was dark in this corner of the museum. The paper was the color of dead grass, and the hills on the paper stretched away from the viewer. They were rendered in folds like a bunched together bedsheet, or corrugated metal when viewed close to its plane, and they were cut in two by a river running switchbacks towards the foreground. A few rows of Chinese characters marked the corner, something to do with the author’s name she assumed. And near the characters was a man, his head bowed, navigating twists in a thin dirt trail.
"Shan shui."
She looked to her left. A man was standing beside her, his eyes to the painting. She hadn’t heard him walk up, and he seemed not to notice her. "What was that?"
"Shan shui." He raised his brow in acknowledgement of the painting. "It’s a style of art. It’s what you’re looking at." He kept his eyes on the subject at hand.
She played coy. "And what exactly am I looking at?"
"A landscape."
"You go to school to learn all that?"
He smiled. It was his turn to look coy. "A landscape that constitutes more than its parts would suggest. A landscape rendering all details within irrelevant." With this the man finally turned to face her, smiled, and gestured back toward the painting.
"The lack of color, the ubiquitous pale in shading and tone, the frailty of man set against the very world that contains him, and the calm with which all this is expressed. It is all intentional. Through this screen everything within is made equal. Even man cannot stake out his claim. He saunters off in the corner, barely worth our attention at all, no more significant than the dirt path which he walks. Indeed, in shan shui he is far less significant than the path itself, for the path is essential to the form, and he is not. In shan shui we find all things in harmony, the majesty of nature balanced against the insignificance of the life therein."
The woman was now smiling at him, though she herself hardly noticed.
"Of course, all art is merely a projection, and the real truth about nature is there is no harmony, and there never has been. For in nature balance is not produced by some delicate union of opposites. In nature balance is forged through conflict, it is the product of extremes set in eternal opposition to one another. It is an idea that is only ever approximated, and never for long. The median of the pendulums swing.
"And so it is with us, for as is the case with all things contained in nature, we reflect the natural way of things. So I ask you, in us does one find balance? Does one find anything close to moral equilibrium? Or harmony? No. One finds great evils, and then in the face of those evils great courage, a light for every darkness. But one is dependent upon the other, always. To see the good in things, contrast is required. To know virtue in this world is to know its enemy. We encompass the universe in what we express, and what grim expressions those include."
The woman was silent. She had stopped smiling. The man walked away.