Longing for the Infinite
Author: Yu-Hsuan Wu
Publisher: Zebra Crossing Press
Year: 2021
Language: Chinese
Pages: 144
ISBN: 978-986-06863-2-6
【About the Book】
The measure of love is to love without measure. In Longing for the Infinite, poet and “literary witch” Yu-Hsuan Wu’s reading notes unfold as a series of love pursuits—each essay a ritual of devotion.
Wu cannot stop probing the depths of those she loves—Gu Cheng, J.D. Salinger, Egon Schiele, Naomi Kawase, Samuel Beckett, Yasujiro Ozu, Franz Kafka, Alice Munro, Kobo Abe, Werner Herzog, Daisuke Igarashi, Marguerite Duras, Janusz Korczak, David Lynch, Herta Müller. Wu traces their intricate and mysterious psychic logics, their ineffable states of poetic being, their subtle and profound aesthetic forms.
Longing for the Infinite is written in the mode of punctum—each piece a sharp response to the beloved who once pierced her. To remember them, to converse with them in order to reach deeper into their worlds, is her form of longing—for the infinite.
【Selected Works】
Going Backward to See the Future
An explosion. They wake from a dream, unsure of where to flee. Stepping onto the balcony, they see a violet-red blaze in the distance. They turn around, wake their child. Together they return beneath the ink-black sky, guarding that strange light. They never imagined death could look so beautiful. They tell their child, “Look. You will remember this until the end of your life.” The firefighters arrive and battle the flames. Hours later, their bodies are swollen with fluid. There is no cure. All that can be done is to drink milk in vast quantities. There is no time to escape. They don't know they won’t survive the next fourteen days. At their burial, their feet are so swollen no shoes will fit. The surface of the city will be scraped away, animals will be shot, all of it buried in a pit. The survivors will be uprooted, collapsing halfway, falling asleep and never waking again, giving birth to malformed children. One by one, they will die, unnoticed, because no one wants to be that close to death.
And yet, she moves closer, toward the ruins of the end. In 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster strikes. International reporters rush to expose the flaws of Soviet communism, the faulty design of the reactor, the incompetence of the operators, the dangers of radioactive contamination. But Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich chooses to approach the disaster’s survivors: the relief soldiers, the displaced families, the former party officials. She records their prayers and confessions in the face of the unthinkable: names written on houses before evacuation; dreams of returning to make the bed; envy of pregnant dogs; the belief that men pulled the trigger but God supplied the bullets. Over ten years, Alexievich compiles these oral histories into Voices from Chernobyl (1997), which earns her the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Swedish Academy honors her for exploring the emotional and spiritual history of the Soviet and post-Soviet people. Her work transcends journalism to create a unique literary form: the polyphonic collage. It becomes a monument to contemporary suffering and courage. For Alexievich, interview-based writing is already part of Russian literary tradition: “Everyone has a story. Assembling different voices into a whole is a way to grasp the spirit of an era.” In 1985, her first book The Unwomanly Face of War interviewed Soviet women who fought in WWII. That same year, she published Last Witnesses, preserving the innocent voices of children who survived the war: “We just hatched a clutch of chicks. I was afraid they would get trampled,” “House, don't catch fire! House, don't catch fire!” “Late at night I opened the window and gave my note to the wind,” “A handful of salt—that was all we had left.”
Published in 1991, Zinky Boys focuses on the ten-year Soviet-Afghan War. The title comes from the zinc coffins sent home, which mothers watched with dread, fearing their sons lay inside. The book drew fierce criticism from the military and Communist Party. In 1992, Alexievich faced trial in a political court; international protest halted the proceedings. Thereafter, her journalism was suppressed, her phone tapped. In 2000, she left Belarus, living in exile in Paris, Gothenburg, and Berlin. Her 2013 book Secondhand Time investigates life in post-Soviet Russia. Each chapter, structured around the contrast of “past...present...,” reveals how people live inside a used-up language, culture, and ideology, devoid of innovation or future dreams.
War drags on. Empires collapse. Socialism crumbles. Whether in the Soviet or Russian era, blood and bodies fill the streets. Alexievich says this is the eternal dialogue between executioners and victims: “Everyone has these stories. Every family can recount pain. I often wonder: who are we? Why has our suffering not led to freedom? That is the great question for me. Why does the slave mentality prevail? Why do we trade freedom for material gain? Or, as history shows, sacrifice it out of fear? ... I worry: how long must we walk this terrifying path? How much more can a person endure?” And still, “In our times, it is difficult to be an honest person. But there is no need to surrender to the compromises totalitarianism depends on. ... I come from the Soviet tradition. As a writer, I must speak for the people.”
“I was always searching for a form that best suited my worldview, that conveyed how my ears listen and my eyes see life,” says Alexievich. Letting “human voices speak for themselves,” each story records national history while narrating a personal life. She calls this form “documentary literature”: “Today, when the world is so multifaceted, documents become more interesting in art, while art itself often feels powerless. Documentation brings us closer to reality because it preserves the original material. ... After writing five books from such material, I declare: art cannot grasp many things about being human.”
Alexievich chooses to face the unknown. She respects the full range of emotion, protects inner transformation, and refuses to impose her personal judgment on the narrative structure. Her documentary transparency echoes Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others: “People expect the weight of witness, not the stain of art—which here stands for deceit or embellishment.”
Yet if sentences shape a writer, and writing is thought, what does it mean that Alexievich writes none of her own? She merely transcribes the monologues and silences of others. Where is her creativity? In truth, her work is far from raw archive. For every five interviews, she selects one. Each subject generates four full cassette tapes, over 100-150 pages of material; she uses about ten. Her artistry lies in the gaze of selection and the control of structure. Take Voices from Chernobyl: she captures the moment when external violence ends and inner violence begins, when trauma compels the victim to relive the ghost of memory—that flash of horror and awe that etched itself too quickly to understand. A woman hides in the brush, smashing her head with a brick. A soldier throws a newborn out a window. Horses taken to slaughter begin to cry.
These records of suffering shock us: we fall into the first-person speech of each narrator. We are no longer ourselves; we are everyone in the story. We carry their emotions. But as the pain grows more visceral and the event fades, we begin to understand that Alexievich is no detached chronicler. Her heart remains on site. What she revives is not factual accuracy but the emotional truth of survival: what did they cling to at the edge of death? A child, a lost lover, a door, a wordless song, a vanished homeland.
In the grip of absurd tyranny, where individual meaning is denied, Alexievich captures the flicker of being in the moment of fracture. In the loss of home, they discover “home”—a spiritual refuge already lost, always slipping away.
Their monologues slowly expose their internal mooring, stitched through repetition and questioning: “I shouldn’t say this... but I must tell you,” “Do you understand what I mean?” Alexievich retains their urgent refrains, aching silences, faltering stops. Their speech and silence, expression and self-listening, swirl into emotional whirlpools. Each voice plunges to the brink and throws itself into another whirlpool, a cycle of survival and collapse. Alexievich’s questions and responses are absent. Their isolation deepens. Their words echo in a void, a loneliness that cannot escape into meaning. But her arrangement of these voices reflects her precise sense of emotional crescendo and restraint.
Moreover, Alexievich’s “polyphonic collage” reflects not only war and tyranny, but also the construction of news and historical discourse. She writes: “History cares only for facts, excluding feelings from truth.” Her interest is not in events or disasters, but in what happens to humanity in our own time. Her creative act is emotional contact: one self encountering another. She is not mirroring events but gathering voices to reveal the angles from which history is constructed. Rather than showcase a limited event, she opens a dimension of history where each individual lives their own infinite path.
The past hasn’t vanished; it hasn’t even passed. Her records of suffering, struggle, and longing are not distant history—they are our shared present. Alexievich says, “The whole world is in danger. Fear has become a larger part of our lives than love. We all need courage to go on. I hope we have enough.” Her burden is not merely a writer’s responsibility. It is a human one. Responsibility means the ability to respond — to bear our existence, to answer to it, and never surrender to the blade still held above us.
【Review & Reflection】
“There is no end to the pursuit and remembrance of love. Longing for the Infinite is a spectacle of love—its unparalleled essence, its primordial force. Yu-Hsuan Wu rushes toward a love that transcends all definitions—a love whose meaning can be endlessly revised, or perhaps one that has never known boundaries to begin with. She writes: ‘The force and talent of a creator lies not only in sculpting a story, but in extending illusory arms to sculpt the soul of the reader.’ But perhaps it’s more than that—perhaps Wu is also sculpting the reader’s capacity to love.”