Is your Sunday about your father, or a football? Sadly, and gladly, mine has to be about literature.

It is about writing a paper on the avant-garde theatre in the morning, and going to lectures on American literature in the afternoon, and in the evening. Our dean has just come back from Columbia University with perfect confidence in winning us over a little ball that the Americans call soccer.

The speakers are terrific, each lighting up some fire here and there. Walt Whitman and the "poetic revolution" is presented first. The speaker has to begin with his memories of poetry readings at St Mark's Place in the East Village, and I can't help feeling, unfairly if also untimely, homesick. Blissfully, the second speaker turns an otherwise dreary academic talk into a sort of stand-up comedy, a translator of Dan Brown and free spirit. The third, a Chinese teaching in America, is generous enough to share all that is new and fresh from his adopted country, including "slam poetry" and "chick literature."

So I've paid my respect to altars of literature on a Sunday. Does it make literature my faith? Has not Robert Brustein said modern drama has become the secular faith? Has not Max Weber so located the social function of literature and art? All in all, has literature replaced religion as the secular faith?

Reading Chi Zijian's The Right Bank of the Argun River (《额尔古纳河的右岸》; translated into English as The Last Quarter of the Moon) a few days ago has made me ecstastic for the whole night, and then unspeakably sad. For a moment, I thought I had a glimpse of heaven: the communal way the Oroqens live in the forest with their tribal folks, the perfect harmony they feel with the universe, and the miraculous practices of shamanism, etc. But it had to be gone all too soon, and for good. Humanity has long lost the touch with golden times living in the memories of the widow of the last chief of the Oroqens. To make matters even worse, we seem to have even stopped hoping for any paradise.