Chapter 155
< Running Away from the Hero! 155 #18. What did I even do? (4)>
Once upon a time, a famous philosopher named Zhuang Zhou lived in China during the Warring States period.
There’s this famous story involving him. One day, Zhuang Zhou had a dream. He was a butterfly in that dream, flitting and fluttering around the flowers all happy and the like, but when he woke up, he had returned to his human self.
Now normally, you’d go, ‘Oh, it’s just that kind of a dream…’ when something like that happens to you.
But as expected of a philosopher, Mister Zhou began wondering, ‘Did I become a butterfly in the dream, or did that butterfly dream of becoming Zhuang Zhou? I cannot tell!’
What followed after that was some hardcore-level philosophising stuff well beyond my pay grade so all I could remember from this tale was the old proverb of ‘butterfly fantasy’.
Oh, there was another thing that I did remember. Wasn’t the ‘butterfly fantasy’ thing used to express the attainment of unity in one’s mind with nature? Or was it the inevitable futility of life itself?
“Dad, are you alright?”
“Yes, I’m fine, dear.”