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Do not get misled by gross statements of what ‘Ch'i’ means – there is no simple translation of it – not even from Chinese to Chinese. Western articulate speech probably comes nearer, as far as I can see it, in Schopenhauer's ‘drive’ or ‘energy’, or Alf Arabi's ‘existence’.
I, to descend from the famous to the nonentity, make a distinction between ‘existence’, to be or not to be (Shakespeare as usual says it better than anyone has been able to say it) and ‘essence’, the whatever-it-is that makes existence worth existing. That is what no one can tell you, and what every philosopher, painter, musician, artist, poet and mere person has to find out for him or her self. I'll write a book about it one day p'raps, p'raps not. That's what your patients, however ill, well, wealthy, poor, stupid, clever, have to find out. They can't be shown, but you may give them a chance to see or find out.
A wonderful, bright and sunny morning – wind and rain both stopped, just for the day perhaps but a welcome rest – ‘Full many a glorious morning have I seen –’1 as the sonnet has it. Do you read them? They are short and the meaning, as with everything W.S. says, unfolds meaning after meaning through one's life. Indeed that is the wonderful thing about medicine and I wish I had realized it when I had the luck to be studying at UCH. But, as at Oxford, one does not, always being preoccupied with some infernal anxiety about ‘qualification’ or ‘Finals’ or how to earn a living or some other worry to fuss about. Including of course, ‘she loves me – she loves me not –’ and ‘Do I love her – do I not’, like the child's game with plucking petals from a flower (or leaves from a pineapple – the Queen's College version of the sweepstake when I was up).
Talking of Shakespeare, I have recently decided, after a long sojourn in the gloomy realms of ghastly good taste in which Gilbert and Sullivan are really not worthy of serious consideration, that in fact they are packed with great sense as well as being witt