Once, I went to New York to see an exhibition of Pompeii, where bodies were carefully transported thousands of miles away from Italy, from the ruins of the ancient city, wrapped in statues of ash and molten rock. The remains of an ancient civilization, buried for more than 2,000 years, were quietly placed in the bustling center of modern civilization on 44th Street in New York, as if our own civilization would not suffer a similar fate. Pompeii was a fertile coastal city in the Roman Empire, similar to today's Los Angeles, and there was no word for "volcano" in Italian until the eruption of Vesuvius on August 24, AD 79. When I said I was going, my friends thought the exhibition was too gloomy, but it wasn't death and loss that attracted me. It was the need for us to come to terms with everything in our lives, neither to escape it nor to indulge in it. People tend to get caught up in one emotion or another: shutting off their senses out of fear, or following their feelings at any cost, fearing that if they don't, life will lose its passion. I just want to see people in their last positions on their deathbeds. Everything on earth lives on and on, between destruction and rebirth, but that touch of love is forever between heaven and earth.

These statues of dead bodies, which have been buried for thousands of years, become an eternal memorial to the irony of life's impermanence. A thousand years of civilization will be wiped out in a day, and then unearthed 2,000 years later, perhaps never again. The truth is both amazing and heart-wrenching. Does this representation diminish the meaning of things in any way? Does this make the love and rejection experienced by these Pompeians whom we have never met more moving or more cruel? I thought, standing in front of the exhibition for a long time. The entire city was buried under 12 feet of ash in just 24 hours. After the end of Roman times, no one knew that Pompeii had ever existed. Pompeii was not excavated until 1740, when a farmer accidentally discovered the ruins while digging a well. Mark Twain, who visited Herculaneum, near Pompeii, in 1867, wrote: "In one apartment, the remains of 18 men were found seated against a wall, their figures reflected on the dark wall, showing the state of every man at the time of the disaster." I stood for a long time in silence before the assorted remains, which had been arranged in a shadowy corner of the museum. Isn't this corner like the secret corner of our hearts that holds the remains of everyone we've ever loved? The way they sit holds the song of love in their hearts, broken or about to unfold, their images imprinted on our most private walls. A few days ago, I was having dinner with a friend of mine, Kerry, in New York, and she brought along her mother, Sarah, and her uncle, Glen.

Sarah and Glen hadn't seen each other in 25 years, and the last time they saw each other was when Kerry's uncle Paul died. Paul is Sarah's brother and Glen's same-sex partner. Kerry remembers being touched by Paul's kindness when she was a child. So the three of us sat together and remembered Paul so deeply that I felt I almost knew him. It was deeply moving to see how Glen and Sarah opened up to each other and shared their hearts. As the night wore on and we talked a lot about Paul, it was clear that Glen was still deeply in love with this man. The next day, Carrey went on a business trip, and Glen returned to New York to run his small shop in SOHO. And I walked alone in Central Park, marveling at the fact that I had been able to witness such a deep and lasting human love, to see old friends reunited after 25 years by this grown-up child who had stood on the stairs and looked at them fondly when they both thought they were most alone, and remembered it all. As I walked through the park, I began to feel sad for the friends and loves that had disappeared from my life, and sorry that I was just a bystander in the story of Glen and Sarah. I sat down next to an old tree that grew out of a stone, and I felt myself snuggling with my old lover in the secret room inside me. It reminds me of my parents, who were panicking at my creativity. My mother, still deeply angry with the world, and my father, at the age of 90, finally made peace with me. I thought of my brother, who had also begun to lose his eyesight. I also think of my first love, Grace, who wrote to me in my 30s, trying to get back together. I remember riding the train into the city to see her, the same city we fell in love with, the same streets, and I wanted to feel what was still the same and what was no longer. We met at her flat for tea and I bought her a yellow rose. As we sat and talked, she was still beautiful, and deep down I began to ache. Yes, I still love her, and I don't want to run away from my feelings for her. But I could also see clearly what we had become: no one was good or bad, just different. At that time, I suddenly found that the head of the rose at hand was inserted from the middle of a wire to hold up the posture of blooming, so my tears covered my eyes, immediately stood up to say goodbye. It was then that I felt for the first time that true love and the truth of life struck me violently at the same time. These two emotions were so clear and undiminished that I confessed that I had never stopped loving the people I had loved, even though I could no longer walk with them. By the time I found myself in a gloomy corner of the museum, facing the charred corpses on display, it was after a dinner with Glenn and Sarah and a walk through Central Park filled with grief and gratitude. I stared at the two bodies. It seemed as if they had just embraced, and though their embrace had burned away, the moment had been immortalized. The more I look at them, the more I realize that their moment is also our moment. We were all in it, and we all wanted something from each other: Glenn and Paul, Glenn and Sarah, Paul and Kerry, my father and me, my mother and I, the hugs that never happened, the goodbyes between me and Grace, the ending of more than 30 years of friendship between my friend Ellen, and the gentle cupping of my head by my beloved wife Susan when I came home exhausted. In the museum, I wandered among the dozens of corpses from Pompeii, thousands of miles away. I looked at them, trying to feel them as hard as I could, while silently discovering all my friends and loved ones. I tried to imagine that these figures were my buried friends and family. In that lonely booth, two intimate figures were shrouded in the spotlight, charred as they ran toward each other, but sealed forever in their embrace. They were confronted by a man crouched on the ground with nowhere to run, a dog curled up, and a man with his hands to his face trying to shield himself from the heat. The other poor man was charred as he descended the stairs. We all have the deepest postures in our bodies, waiting to be released by love or crisis. What postures are brewing in my body and waiting to be unleashed? In your body? I left the museum and entered the Sixth Avenue Cafe. I sat down at a table near the door and could see the crowd coming and going down the street. I thought, what are we building our lives on? What are the years of curling and stretching on this sidewalk? After sitting for a while, I strolled back to Central Park to find a tree that was at least 200 years old, its roots breaking through the SLATE, its trunk arching like Hercules, its branches reaching into the sun. It stands in the eternal embrace of the blue sky, never bow, never look back, this is the great power of existence. Its top branches are almost a tree of their own, and its tall and straight lends verdure to the rocks that first held it back. I reached out my hand and caressed its wrinkled bark to feel the huge tangled roots beneath the slab. Why is such a teacher so silent and silent? As dark clouds rolled in the distance, I got up and walked leisurely over to the Frick Collection, a private museum between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, to view a collection of etchings by Rem brandt. There I saw his 1651 etching of Goldweigher's Field. The title of this engraving was imprinted on my mind [illustration]. Though the gold of the world is heavy, the gold of the soul is light as a feather. Isn't that our challenge: to identify what gold is, to find it, to assess its value, and to determine whether it lifts us up more lightly or brings us down.