Many places have a "forest that shouldn't be entered." Even people who are used to working in the mountains feel there is something there. They are suddenly overcome with fear and it becomes the custom to avoid certain places. These places exist. I don't know what is there, but I think they are real . . . The world is more than we can fathom with our five senses. The world doesn't exist just for humans. So I think it is all right to have such things. This is why I think it's a mistake to think about nature from the idea of efficiency, that forests should be preserved because they are essential for human beings . . . I am concerned, because for me the deep forest is connected in some way to the darkness deep in my heart. I feel that if it is erased, then the darkness inside my heart would also disappear, and my existence would grow shallow.

"[...] Understanding the world as a collection of  aesthetics, of brands, instead of a series of philosophies and power struggles means focusing on how things appear, and not how or why they work.  It’s bad enough to think about art this way, but thinking of yourself this way is a real disaster, [it] means neglecting what drives you, what fulfills you, what makes you human. The invented lifestyles of these aesthetics offer no path to embodiment, because they aren’t designed for entities with bodies. They’re  designed for TikTok, and hashtags, and the wiki."

The individual who understands transformism can escape identity, understanding that the distinctions between things are fluid and nothing ever does perfectly conform to any distinct model. Escaping identity means escaping from conformity to a model. In Guo Xiang’s commentary of the Zhuangzi, the ‘self’ is taken to refer to a false notion of our identity. For the true self Guo typically uses a particular word, zi 自, which has an unusual grammatical character: it also means ‘self’, but it can be read as an adverb rather than a noun, meaning ‘spontaneously’. Thus, Guo could be suggesting that the true self is not a thing at all, but a kind of spirit of spontaneity. All other kinds of self are what he calls ji 跡, or ‘traces’. Ji 跡 literally means ‘footprints’, meaning models to be imitated – ideas of the various identities that we could potentially give ourselves.

“No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession.”