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Weekly Notes Vol.4 | Hold Off on the Second Thing

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 13:00:00 GMT

First, the Binding Result

Last issue I tied those twenty minutes to “right after washing up”. This week: six days.

The change is tangible — I no longer make a decision before I sit down. The thing has stopped requiring the step of talking myself into it; like brushing my teeth, the action comes first and the reason afterwards, or no reason at all.

Stability brought something else with it, though: it stopped giving me a sense of achievement. On the sixth day I felt no pleasure, only a flat “well, that is how it goes”. And right behind that came a very familiar impulse: since this is so stable, surely I can add one more thing.

I held it off this week. Looking back over these four issues, every problem came not from doing too little but from wanting to add too much.

Three Small Things This Week

One: I wrote down a minimum version — one page still counts. On Thursday I got back very late and had planned to skip. With the rule changed to “one page still counts”, I sat down for one page — and read four. Allowing the smallest version holds up far better than demanding all or nothing.

Two: I noticed that reading smoothly is when nothing sticks. Two days this week ran fast and fluent, and afterwards I could not recall a single sentence. One day ran slow, stuck on a paragraph I read three times, and that sentence is still with me. Fluency and retention are different things.

Three: I wrote the urge to add a thing down, then did not act on it. Once written, the impulse became something I could check against; two days later most of it had gone. An impulse needs an outlet, not fulfilment.

One Thought

I used to treat enthusiasm as the fuel of persistence, so a drop in enthusiasm looked like the beginning of the end.

Now I split it differently: enthusiasm starts things, routine keeps them. Anything launched on enthusiasm alone rarely survives three weeks; what survives has turned into routine — unglamorous, but present every day.

The most tempting mistake after stabilising is to add more while the fire is hot; and once you do, the first thing loosens too.

So this week I am holding off on the second thing.

Only One Thing for Next Week

No second thing. One rule change only: write “one page still counts” into the rules formally, somewhere I can see it.

No further weekly accounting for this one: it has become part of the day, like sleeping or brushing teeth — nothing that needs supervising.

Weekly Notes Vol.3 | Fix the When Before Asking How Long

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 13:00:00 GMT

First, the Twenty-Minute Result

Last issue I cut that half hour down to twenty minutes. This week: five days, two more than the week before.

The extra two days did not come from trying harder. The real difference is that the number is not intimidating — before sitting down I no longer have to talk myself into it, or first weigh whether today is worth it.

One more concrete finding: what makes me quit is almost never a lack of time. It is the phone sitting within reach. It needs no reason; it only needs one absent-minded reach.

Three Small Things This Week

One: moved the phone charger into the living room. One action, and the whole evening’s back-and-forth tug disappeared. Changing the environment clearly costs less than changing the will.

Two: wrote down something trivial but useful. On all five successful days I sat down at the same moment — right after washing up. On the two days when the time floated, nothing happened. Which suggests when matters more than how long.

Three: squeezed the distance between “intending to do it” and “doing it” down to a single step. Anything that requires “getting ready first” mostly never gets done. Put the place, the tool and the doorway in position beforehand, and starting is down to one motion.

One Thought

I used to explain every failure as a shortage of willpower, so I set harsher targets, failed harder, and grew more certain that my willpower was the problem. An efficient loop, except that nothing changed.

Now I would rather treat it as a physics problem: move the obstacle, nail down the trigger, and only then does willpower get its turn — and it only has to push a little.

Do not ask yourself why you cannot keep it up. First ask how much resolve this thing needs before it can begin.

The more resolve it demands, the more likely the design is wrong.

Only One Thing for Next Week

Bind those twenty minutes to “right after washing up”.

No more “before sleep” — that is a stretch of time without edges, and it can be pushed back indefinitely, all the way into tomorrow. Result next issue.

Weekly Notes Vol.2 | Three Days Out of Seven Still Counts

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:00:00 GMT

First, the Result of Last Issue’s One Thing

At the end of the last issue I set myself a single task: give the half hour before sleep to a paper book, and leave the phone in another room.

The result is not flattering — three days out of seven. On two nights the phone made its way back to the bedside table; on two others I turned a couple of pages and fell asleep.

By my old standard that counts as failure, and the whole thing gets filed under “things I cannot do”. This time I changed the arithmetic: three days is not a failure, it is three days. What matters is whether I can pick it up again on day four after a break — and this week I did, so it never went back to zero.

Three Small Things This Week

One: write the full list of things I want to do, then force myself to strike three out. Fill the list as usual, then delete three — not postpone, delete. Looking back, not one of the three crossed-out items came back to mind. What I genuinely want has always been less than what I write down.

Two: reread a note from six months ago. The same passage: half a year back I took from it “what to remember”; this time I took “what I can leave unremembered”. I had not changed; the question had, and the same page shifted a layer of meaning.

Three: changed the quilt on the first cold day. A small thing, and it quietened the whole evening. Some troubles do not need solving — they need handling one step early, and the rest of the annoyance never arrives.

One Thought

I used to read “persistence” as never missing a day, which means one miss voids the whole thing.

That bar is too steep. A more workable version: persistence is not never breaking, it is being able to resume after breaking. Doing it daily leans on willpower; coming back after a gap leans on treating it as an ordinary part of the day rather than a test.

Whether a thing is worth doing shows up in whether you are still doing it three years from now — not in whether this week scored full marks.

Only One Thing for Next Week

Cut that half hour down to twenty minutes.

Not surrender — a lower threshold. Twenty minutes is easier to actually do, and only what gets done produces a day four.

Weekly Notes Vol.1 | Folding a Week Into a Single Page

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Record First, Judge Later

This column is new: Weekly Notes. Once a week I sit down and fold the past week — what got done, what got read, what would not leave me alone — into a single page. No chasing news, no padding for length. On a week with nothing to say, three lines count as filing on time.

I carved it out because I kept noticing that “worth remembering” and “worth a full article” are two different things. Most of what deserves remembering cannot fill an article on its own; but piled together, that is the actual shape of a year.

Three Small Things This Week

One: keep a stretch of the morning for myself first. No rush to the phone — a glass of water first, then the thing I least want to do goes at the very top of the day. A few days of this taught me that the hard part is rarely the task; it is the act of starting.

Two: read a book slowly. Twenty pages a day, copying out any sentence I liked. Slowing down revealed that the same paragraph gives far more than it does when skimmed.

Three: count how often attention gets cut in half. The result stung a little: a single stretch of focus rarely lasts past twenty minutes. But writing the number down made it less nerve-racking — once a problem is seen, it turns into something you can work on.

One Thought

I used to think of a record as a private ledger with no real value. More and more it looks like leaving a path for a later version of myself: when the day comes that I need to confirm what actually happened during a stretch of time, there is at least one page I can check.

Keeping a record is not about how much a given day mattered. It is about being able to confirm, many days later, that you really did walk through it.

Only One Thing for Next Week

Give the half hour before sleep to a paper book, and leave the phone in another room. Just that one. Nothing more.

18 October, Sunday: Filling In Today’s Square

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:30:00 GMT

18 October, Sunday, sunny

I slept until I woke up on my own. The curtain wasn’t quite closed, and a strip of light lay on the wall, creeping slowly upward. That was the least hurried sleep I’ve had all week.

I started by tidying the flat: clothes into the washing machine, everything on the desk back where it belongs, the floor mopped twice. Tidying is a strange thing — it looks like you are sorting out other objects, but really you are sorting yourself out. When I straightened up and looked around, the room was clean and a corner of my head was empty again.

Three small things done this Sunday

Tidied the flat properly
Went out and walked for forty minutes
Read twenty pages

At noon I cooked for myself: two dishes and a soup, half an hour longer than usual, but I ate slowly. Normally eating is like solving a problem; today eating was just eating.

In the afternoon I went out and walked for forty minutes. The weather was good. Kids were cycling along the road, old men were playing chess under the trees, the plane leaves are turning yellow and a few had landed on car roofs. Halfway round, something in me sank — I thought about Monday coming again, and about how none of the things I wanted to do were finished.

Then it straightened out: the weekend is for breathing, not for closing tickets. So I slowed down and took one extra street.

Home in the evening, I made a cup of tea and turned a few pages. I found a line I liked and copied it into my notebook.

Before bed I wrote next week’s three things down on paper — all small, small enough that I am certain to finish them.

A day does not need to be dramatic. Fill in today’s square, and you are already a step further than yesterday.

An ordinary Sunday. And a good one.

Reading The Art of War: The Most Famous Book on War Spends Its Time Telling You Not to Fight

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 13:10:00 GMT

1. Why I Read It

For years my picture of The Art of War was a handbook of stratagems: the success literature quoted again and again in training sessions, the book sliced into handy tips in business manuals. Opening the original, I found it far quieter than those uses, and far more serious.

Its first sentence stopped me. It does not talk of stratagem but of weight: war is a great matter of state. If a book sets its opening on “the ground of death and life”, nothing after it can be light.

Reading on, what surprised me more was its centre of gravity. The most famous of all books on war spends its time urging you not to fight: if you can avoid battle, avoid it, and if you must fight, finish quickly. It puts “not fighting” at the top — almost the reverse of what a book of war is imagined to be.

2. The Skeleton First

The Art of War runs to thirteen chapters, about six thousand characters (a little over six thousand in the standard text), long attributed to Sun Wu at the end of the Spring and Autumn period. It is short, but its tone is extremely restrained; there is almost no story, only verdicts. In 1972 a cache of bamboo slips was unearthed from a Han tomb at Yinqueshan in Shandong, among them a copy of The Art of War, differing here and there from the received text — and this is one starting point for how it is re-edited today.

The order of the thirteen chapters is itself like the course of a campaign. Set out as a table:

Chapter	Contents
Estimates	The five factors and seven calculations; it opens on “war is a great matter of state”
Waging War	The cost of war; “victory is prized, not length of time”
Attack by Stratagem	“Subdue the enemy without fighting”, “know the enemy and know yourself”
Dispositions	First make yourself invincible, then wait for the enemy to be vincible
Energy	Momentum and measure; “meet the enemy with the orthodox, win with the surprise”
Weak and Strong	Make the enemy come to you; strike the weak, avoid the strong
Maneuvering	Profit and the indirect; “turn the indirect into the direct”
The Nine Changes	Various terrains, and “some orders from the ruler need not be obeyed”
The Army on the March	Encamping and reading the enemy’s signs
Terrain	Six kinds of ground; “know both enemy and self, and victory is not in doubt”
The Nine Situations	Nine predicaments; “put men in a fatal spot and they will survive”
Attack by Fire	The conditions for fire, and caution in war
Use of Spies	Five kinds of spy; the work ends here

Expand: the lines I noted while reading (my own annotations)

Estimates: “war is a great matter of state, the ground of death and life, the way of survival or ruin — it must be examined closely”
Attack by Stratagem: “to subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest excellence”
Dispositions: “first make yourself invincible, then wait for the enemy to be vincible”
Energy: “in battle, meet the enemy with the orthodox and win with the surprise”
Weak and Strong: “make the enemy come to you, and do not go to him”
The Nine Situations: “put men in a fatal spot and they will survive; place them in a dead ground and they will live”

One warning: do not read it as a manual of ruthless cunning. It is about cost and odds — first work out whether you can win and whether you can afford it, and only then how to fight. Read as a set of tricks for manipulating people, and you have it exactly backwards.

3. Passages and Marginalia

On “weight”: the first line of the book

兵者，国之大事，死生之地，存亡之道，不可不察也。

— Chapter One, Estimates

My own working translation: War is a great matter of state — the ground of death and life, the way of survival or ruin — and it must be examined closely.

The opening says nothing of stratagem; it speaks of weight. Those four characters, “it must be examined closely”, fix the tone of the whole book: this is a thing to be weighed again and again, not a thing to be enjoyed in a rush.

笔记The much-quoted “war is a way of deception” also stands in this chapter, but directly after “it must be examined closely”. First it tells you not to be reckless, then it tells you how to mislead the enemy in battle — reverse the order and you have a different book.

On “the highest excellence”: a counter-intuitive claim

是故百战百胜，非善之善者也；不战而屈人之兵，善之善者也。

— Chapter Three, Attack by Stratagem

My own working translation: Hence to win a hundred battles out of a hundred is not the highest excellence; to make the enemy submit without fighting is the highest excellence.

着重点A hundred victories out of a hundred is not counted best here; to make the enemy yield without a battle is best. A book of war raising “not fighting” to the top is the least warlike thing about it.

My note: this line is usually taken as high moral sentiment, but it is thoroughly practical. A hundred victories out of a hundred means a hundred engagements, and every one of them costs lives and grain; to bring the enemy down without a fight saves precisely that. What it praises is not mercy but efficiency.

On “judgement”: a familiar old saying

知彼知己，百战不殆。

— Chapter Three, Attack by Stratagem

My own working translation: Know the enemy and know yourself, and in a hundred battles you will not be in danger.

These eight characters are so familiar that the original slips past. Note the order it insists on: “know the enemy” first, “know yourself” second — the hardest thing is to see through the other side, and the easiest thing to overlook is to see through yourself.

危险Notice it does not say “a hundred victories”, but “not in danger” — no defeat. The aim drops from winning to not losing, which is the book’s consistent caution: shut the door on defeat first, then talk about victory. And even here it only reaches “no danger”; to reach “certain victory” you must also “know Heaven and Earth”.

On “invincibility”: where the initiative comes from

昔之善战者，先为不可胜，以待敌之可胜。不可胜在己，可胜在敌。

— Chapter Four, Dispositions

My own working translation: Those skilled in war in the past first made themselves invincible, and then waited for the enemy to become vincible. Invincibility rests with oneself; vincibility rests with the enemy.

着重点What keeps you from being beaten lies with you; whether you can beat the other side depends on them. So it spends all its effort on the first part: patch your own holes first, then wait for the other side to open one.

My note: this is why it keeps returning to “defence”. Defence is not passivity; it hands the uncontrollable part over to time and grips the controllable part tightly. Waiting, too, is an action.

On the ending: it closes on spies

故惟明君贤将，能以上智为间者，必成大功。

— Chapter Thirteen, Use of Spies, the last chapter of the book

My own working translation: Hence only a wise ruler and a capable general who can use the most intelligent men as spies will achieve great results.

A book about waging war ends on intelligence. And it makes the use of spies sound momentous: to pay a high price for information is the thrifty way to fight; those who grudge that money often lose the whole war.

笔记Ending here is not a non sequitur. Having covered cost, odds, terrain and fire, it comes back to the most basic thing: how much your knowledge of the enemy is worth. It would rather spend money on information before the war than on bodies during it.

Why the thirteen chapters fall in this order

From first to last it walks a chain: first decide whether to fight at all (Estimates, Waging War), then look for ways to fight less (Attack by Stratagem), then how to stand undefeated (Dispositions), and only then how to fight (Energy, Weak and Strong, Maneuvering), followed by particular situations (the Nine Changes, on the March, Terrain, the Nine Situations, Attack by Fire), closing with intelligence. The course of a war is arranged as a decision process you could review afterwards¹.

Before you start: two small things

One is the edition. Modern readers commonly use the Song text of the Eleven Commentators, or the version in the Seven Military Classics; after the Yinqueshan bamboo slips were unearthed in 1972, the textual differences between received and ancient copies were re-examined. When choosing, see whether the edition states which source text it follows. The other is method. It is almost all verdicts, with no story, and read quickly it looks like a book of maxims; read slowly, putting each sentence back into its chapter, and you see what question it is answering².

4. What I Put to Use

Work out the cost before you talk of victory. “Victory is prized, not length of time” does not urge haste; it warns that dragging on is itself a loss. The same applies off the battlefield: keep “winning” and “affording it” as separate sums, and many a needless fight cancels itself on the spot.
First make yourself invincible. Before acting, ask: if this fails, what is the worst I lose, and can I hold that? Only if I can, go on to the next step. Treating “no defeat” as the part you control is a very usable rule.
Make the enemy come to you, and do not go to him. Try to let the other side follow your rhythm instead of being dragged along by events. Even in a single conversation, decide first who sets the pace today, and the outcome changes.

5. Closing

Having read twenty-four pieces up to here, this is where the series ends. Looking back at the first, the Analects, I find the two books shaking hands at the same point: neither talks of luck, both talk of judgement — one teaches you to see a person clearly, the other to see a situation clearly; one says “do not impose on others what you would not want yourself”, the other “know the enemy and know yourself”. In the end it is the same thing: before you act, see clearly who stands opposite you.

From the Analects to The Art of War, the twenty-four readings differ, but together they amount to one habit: treating a book as a practice you can return to on the spot, again and again. Here it can close.

Footnotes

On the order: the arrangement of the thirteen chapters need not come from Sun Wu alone; later editors may have had a hand. Read in the given order, however, and it does look like a chain of decisions running from “should we fight at all” to “how to fight”. ↩
On “war is a way of deception”: this comes from the passage in Estimates that lists the ways of deception, and concerns feints and misdirection on the field. It is one small section, not the book’s thesis; the book’s position is nearer “win first, then seek battle”. ↩

Reading the Odyssey: The Last One Sang Wrath; This One Sings a Man of Many Turns

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 13:40:00 GMT

1. Why I Read It

I finished the Iliad, and months passed before I opened the Odyssey. I expected a collection of mythic adventures: the Cyclops, the Sirens, the witch — a shelf crowded with monsters. The first page corrected me.

Stranger still were the first four books. The hero does not appear at all; they belong to the people sitting and waiting — the wife whose house is overrun by suitors, the son who sails out to look for his father. A poem named for a hero spends its opening four books on other people’s waiting.

What won me over was its opening line. The Iliad’s first word was “wrath”, anger from the very start; the Odyssey’s first word sings of a man of many turns. Both are epics; one tells how a man burns, the other how a man comes home.

2. The Skeleton First

The Odyssey too runs to twenty-four books, about 12,100 lines in the standard text (the usual count is 12,109), in the same hexameter as the Iliad. The present action covers little time, but the hero’s ten years of wandering are folded inside it: the first half looks for him, the second half has him tell his own story. Its greatest difference from the Iliad is that where the Iliad writes of war and honour, it writes of homecoming and endurance.

The shape of the twenty-four books, set out as a table:

Book	Contents
1–4	The “Telemachy”: trouble at home, and the son sailing out to find his father
5–8	Odysseus leaves Calypso and drifts to the Phaeacians; hearing his own deeds sung, he weeps
9–12	He tells his ten years of wandering: the Cyclops, the witch Circe, the underworld, the Sirens
13–16	Back on Ithaca, disguised as a beggar; recognised by the swineherd and his son
17–20	Enduring insults in his own hall; testing his wife and servants
21–22	The contest of the bow; the suitors are shot down
23–24	The recognition with Penelope; a settlement the next day, and the poem ends

Expand: a few faces (my own annotations)

Odysseus: resourceful, enduring, and a great inventor of stories; for half the poem he is the one telling his own tale
Penelope: the wife who stays, holding the suitors off for years by weaving by day and unravelling by night
Telemachus: the son, the true lead of the first four books, growing from a bullied boy into a man who can stand beside his father
Athena: the god who helps throughout, changing his looks and giving him plans
The rivals on the road: the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Calypso — obstacles, and something like stamps in a passport
Eumaeus: the swineherd, the most ordinary man in the poem, a loyal servant who also serves as a guide

One warning: do not read it as a storybook of adventures. However many monsters there are, they are only signposts; the spine of the poem is “coming home”, and every episode asks the same question — how much distance is left.

3. Passages and Marginalia

On the opening: the first word is “man”

Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns, who wandered far and wide after he sacked the holy citadel of Troy.

— Book 1, opening

My own working translation.

The previous epic’s first word was “wrath”; this one sings of a “man”. The same word — “of many turns” — says both that his road twisted and turned, and that his mind did too: the road is underfoot, and it is also inside him.

笔记One word’s bias says a great deal: writing of war, the poet thinks first of temper; writing of homecoming, he thinks first of a living person. The difference between the two books is on the table from the first line.

On “companions”: one sentence that settles the loss

The fools, who ate the cattle of Helios the Sun; and he took from them the day of their homecoming.

— Book 1, the poet’s aside

My own working translation.

着重点The whole tragedy is settled in one sentence: the day of homecoming was thrown away by their own hands. Not a sea-monster, not a giant — they could not keep their mouths shut. This line of self-restraint matters more than any storm.

My note: that gives the rest of the journey a second meaning. What he has to overcome is not only what is at sea, but the companions who will eat anything once hungry — and in the end he comes home alone.

On “Nobody”: a lie that saves a life

Nobody is my name.

— Book 9, Odysseus to the Cyclops

My own working translation.

He survives by way of a false name. Blinded, the Cyclops calls to his fellows that “Nobody is killing me”, and they take him for mad and stay away.

危险Here, for the first time, the poem makes lying a hero’s skill. In the Iliad, strength means muscle; here, survival means mouth. One culture, two standards, and the poet writes both as virtues.

On “refusal”: Calypso’s immortality

The goddess promised to make him immortal and ageless, but she could not persuade his heart; he still longed day and night for home, if only to glimpse a wisp of smoke.

— Book 5, Odysseus on Calypso’s island

My own working translation.

着重点What tempts him is not a monster but a good place that gives you everything. Immortality, ease, beauty — nothing missing; and still he wants to leave. The strongest contest in the poem has for its opponent not evil but good.

My note: writing this episode, the poet does not make Calypso a villain. She treats him truly and genuinely cannot keep him. That turns “home” from a question of geography into a choice of value.

On “recognition”: the secret of a bed

Penelope tests him by ordering the marriage bed carried out; he blurts out that he made it himself, that one of its posts is a living olive tree rooted in the ground, and no one could move it. That sentence is the real proof of identity.

— Book 23, husband and wife reunited

My own working translation.

The most moving recognition in the book rests not on a birthmark or a token but on a private fact only two people know. Twenty years on, a face can be faked; a bed no one can move cannot.

My note: the poem uses several layers of recognition — the dog knows its master, the scar knows an old acquaintance, and only this tree knows the marriage. The poet puts the deepest evidence in a piece of furniture.

Three recognitions, each deeper than the last

The old dog Argos knows him first and wags his tail and dies; the nurse sees the scar on his leg and knows him; his wife waits until he says the secret of the bed himself before she will believe. Each recognition comes nearer the heart, and each is harder than the last. “Coming home” is not pushing open a door; it is letting a self who has almost become a stranger walk back into his old place¹.

Before you start: two small things

One is the edition. In translation, the spellings of people and gods differ greatly — Odysseus becomes Ulysses in some English versions, and Penelope’s name shifts shape too; mixing them gets confusing. Pick a version and read for smoothness first, then decide whether you want a second at hand. The other is method. The first four books have no hero and are easy to lose; read them as a story of the household in their own right, and when the hero walks on in Book Five, you can look back at who was holding things up while he was gone².

4. What I Put to Use

Make “home” the coordinate, not the adventure the map. After each stretch of the journey, ask whether he is nearer Ithaca or farther. Read that way, and the scattered episodes fall into one line.
While Odysseus tells his own story, watch whom he is telling it to. Books Nine to Twelve are all his monologue, and his audience is the Phaeacians. He is building a version of events that makes him look well — the storyteller is also shaping himself.
Follow the hidden thread of hospitality. Good hosts are rewarded, bad hosts come to grief; the Cyclops is the host turned inside out. The Greeks took “how you treat a guest” with the utmost seriousness, and this thread shows the human world more clearly than any monster.

5. Closing

Closing the book undid a prejudice: I had thought it a storybook of adventures. It is really a book about coming home, and it tells you that homecoming depends not on strength alone but on endurance, cunning, and a story someone is willing to believe. Its bravest moment is not the killing of a giant but the bed that no one can move.

Next: The Art of War. A book about coming home is done; the next is about winning without fighting. Odysseus turns his wit on the road; Sun Tzu turns wit toward avoiding the battlefield altogether. I want to see what that same cleverness becomes in a different use.

Footnotes

On the “three recognitions”: dog, scar, bed, corresponding to the bystander, the family and the partner. Some readers hold that this tightening structure is the poem’s cleverest device for its theme of homecoming — the quicker the recognition, the shallower the return; the slower, the more secure the place. ↩
On structure: the hero’s absence from the first four books is there to raise “home” and “the people who wait” first. Other scholars argue the Telemachy may not belong to the original poem; whatever the truth, reading it in the given order is still the easiest way. ↩

In the Blink of an Eye: Reflections on My Time at Shanxi Jinzhong Institute of Technology

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:30:00 GMT

The past is still vivid.

No feast lasts forever; in the end we each go our own way.

The last page turns, and the road ahead begins. A bow to each of you — and then we go our separate ways.

I. Beginnings

My undergraduate degree was finished here, at Shanxi Jinzhong Institute of Technology.

The school sits in Yuci District, Jinzhong. Its predecessor was the College of Information and Business, founded in 2002 by North China Institute of Technology (today’s North University of China); when the parent institution was renamed, it became the Information and Business College of North University of China, and after relocations and a period of independent operation, the Ministry of Education approved its conversion in 2021 into an independent, privately run full-time undergraduate university under the name Shanxi Jinzhong Institute of Technology. From independent college to a name of its own, the school itself is only in its early twenties — about the same age I was when I arrived.

The campus covers over a thousand mu. The motto is 谨信博学，经世致用 — earnest and trustworthy, broadly learned; knowledge put to use in the world. Nearly seventeen thousand students, and more than a thousand full-time and part-time teachers. I studied Computer Science and Technology, in the School of Information Innovation and Big Data.

II. Internship and Graduation Project

March 1 — the final semester began, and from that day I started on my graduation project. On paper there was plenty of time: three months, more than enough. It only became clear once I started that a graduation project is never just “the project”.

Forms, signatures, submissions, reformatting, waiting for notices, replacing materials, signing again, submitting again — none of it is large, but it arrives at unpredictable intervals, every day, and the accumulation is a constant low-grade drain. Plenty of small things went wrong along the way: technical dead ends, back-and-forth in the process, and the various small mistakes that come from my own unreliable memory. I will not go through them one by one; many of the details have blurred by now.

It ran on until mid-June before it was finally finished, piece by piece. The good news is that the whole thing went smoothly — and much of the credit goes to my supervisor, Ms. Li. She was brought in from North University of China, but she was thoroughly responsible, and news travelled faster through her than through anything else: she passed on every notice and requirement the moment it came down. Information chains in private universities are sometimes less than smooth, and having a reliable teacher as a bridge saves an enormous amount of pointless anxiety and waiting.

Workbench during the graduation project

When it was over, the school arranged graduation photos, and a group photo of the whole department. Standing in the ranks, I felt no particular swell of emotion — not out of any great nostalgia, nor any particular reluctance to part; it simply seemed that since I had made it to the end, having something to remember it by was a good thing.

Graduation photo

III. The Last Night

Key moment · the night of 17 June 2026 (my last night at the school)

📜 Collected both certificates (diploma and degree)
📚 Packed up every book I had used, ready to sell them tomorrow
🌙 That night I did not think about much

the night of 17 June was my last night at the school. It was also the day I collected both certificates — the diploma and the degree. Two sheets of paper so light they seemed to weigh nothing, carrying the whole weight of more than seven hundred days and nights.

Diploma and degree certificate

Once they were put away, I went back to the dormitory and took every book I had used down off the shelf into one pile: textbooks, printed slides, notebooks filled with handwriting, exam papers thumbed soft. Packing them up was, in its own way, packing up the traces I had left here. Squared off, tied, ready to be sold first thing in the morning.

The books, squared and tied

Lying in bed, listening to the occasional trundle of a suitcase wheel and footsteps in the corridor, I felt oddly calm. Because from the moment I enrolled I knew: in the blink of an eye, it ends — and we part. Knowing the ending from the start means that when it actually arrives you are not thrown into a panic. Like a match whose final whistle you knew in advance: all that is left is to play well, and then walk off the pitch.

The last night in the dormitory

IV. Farewell

18 June 2026 — the day of departure

I woke up, and it was the morning of 18 June. No ceremony, no parting words. Hao Xinyu and I counted up the books from the whole dormitory and carried them to the recycling stall beside the south gate. Piled together they looked like a small paper mountain — every textbook the whole dormitory had collected. My share was weighed, priced, and sold for 15 yuan.

Those books had been carried back from the textbook office one by one, their covers new and smelling of ink, every one of them heavy. In the days here I turned them over countless times, marked them in every colour, stuffed them into a backpack, into a desk drawer, under a pillow — they were heavy time, heavy youth. And now all that weight came to an emptiness of regret. It was not the small, careless friction that morning between Hao Xinyu, Yuan Haonan and me that hollowed me out; what really did was the absurdity of the exchange: a road you laid out over seven hundred days, converted at the end into one shrivelled number.

The recycling stall by the south gate

The pile of books

Selling the books did not go smoothly. The whole dormitory’s books were being sold together, but Yuan Haonan had been away from school most of the time, and after several rounds of phone calls we still had not agreed on anything — he would not allow his books to be disposed of. The trouble was that the books had long since been mixed together, and there was no way to tell which was whose. So there was nothing for it but to crouch beside the stall and pick them out one by one. The sun was already fierce, hot on the back of my neck. I pulled his books out, restacked them, carried them up the stairs alone and put them back in the dormitory that had already been emptied. In that moment a kind of melancholy settled in that I could not name — you have already reached the end, and still you must tangle once more with these sheets of paper that finished their work long ago. Farewell is never the clean wave of a film; it is loose ends and scattered things, trailing all the unfinished human business behind it.

Tianyuan Canteen

At noon I went to Tianyuan Canteen one last time. Straight to the knife-cut noodle window, one bowl, exactly as usual. The same cook, the same taste, and the same faded price list taped to the wall. In the days here I queued at this window more times than I could count — sometimes hungry straight out of class, sometimes drifting over on a weekend after sleeping until I woke on my own, sometimes alone, sometimes with classmates. The last bowl I ate facing Hao Xinyu.

The last bowl of knife-cut noodles

The two of us talked in fragments — where we were going, what work we were looking for, when we might meet again. The steam off the noodles rose against my face and mixed with the heat outside, and for a moment it felt like no more than an ordinary lunch, as if there were still classes after it. But I knew that was not so. This was the last meal I would eat here as a student.

In the afternoon I went back and kept packing: toiletries, odds and ends, everything swept into bags. Half a bottle of shampoo left; earphone cables knotted into a knot that would not come undone; at the bottom of a drawer, a few milk-tea receipts and a coin that had fallen in at some unknown moment. Not one of these things was actually useful; I was simply in no state to sort, categorise and throw things away, so I swept the lot into bags and took them with me. When I was done, the dormitory was truly empty — six beds stripped to bare boards, six desks with nothing left on them, sunlight slanting in through the gap in the curtains, the air smelling of cleaning fluid and dust.

Afterwards, the class monitor and the others in the dormitory finished packing too. I stood in the corridor and watched them one by one drag their suitcases out through the door, wheels rumbling on the concrete, near and then far, disappearing around the corner. A wave, and an “I’m off” — and under that “I’m off” sat a sentence none of us said out loud: go now, and who knows when we meet again.

Last to leave: I was the last one out, and the last to leave the student residence. I watched the dormitory auntie check the rooms one by one, take out her keys, and snap the main door shut. That click was a full stop with no room for argument: this far, and no further.

There was far too much to carry alone, so I went back to the second-hand stall by the south gate and rented a battered tin trolley for 10 yuan — the owner called it “a premium price”. I stacked everything I had packed onto it and pushed it from Student Dormitory Building No. 2 all the way to the south gate of Jinzhong Institute of Technology. That walk normally takes five minutes, but pushing a loaded trolley, wheels creaking on the concrete, every step stretched out. Teaching buildings, the library, the sports ground, the canteen went past one after another — every one of them a view I had walked hundreds of times, every one of them telling me goodbye without a sound.

By the time I reached the south gate the sun was already low. I had assumed I was the only one in the class still here — most of the graduates had gone. Then I turned a corner and saw Su Guanghui, Wei Weiyu and a few other classmates. “A crowd”, in this case, meant only the handful of them, but at that moment a few familiar faces were enough to make it feel less lonely. We stood at the gate and talked for a few minutes, and learned they had not left either. I imagine there were more than just them — someone else was probably in some corner of the campus at that very moment, saying a last goodbye to somebody. But that is a story for later.

That evening I took a taxi home alone. It happened to be my first ride on the Sunshine Chuxing app, so the new-user discount meant it cost almost nothing. The car pulled out of the gate, through the streets of Yuci District, onto the road home. The wind through the window carried the dry cool of a summer night on the Jinzhong plain, and I looked back once — the school sign at the south gate standing quietly in the dusk, exactly as it had every time I passed through it, no different at all.

V. Bewilderment

In that busy-ness of not knowing what I was busy with, my undergraduate years ended — hurriedly, carelessly.

No surprises. Everything was within expectation: classes, exams, internship, project, defence, certificates, photographs — each reached along a track already laid, with no unexpected scenery.

No regrets either. What should have been learned I learned properly; what should have been done I did steadily; every step I took part in, finished, and passed. So no regrets.

Only bewilderment. And melancholy.

Afterwards something sat heavy in me, a stone of no particular size, of no explainable origin, with no way out.

Perhaps it was everyone scattering to their own corners of the world — forty-five of us gathered in one classroom from different places, and after graduating we scattered back onto our separate tracks. The hardest thing in this world is not meeting, but meeting again. Many people, in this life, will truly never be seen again.

Or perhaps it was facing work and choices right away — with the diploma in hand, it finally sank in that the umbrella called “student” had been taken back, that from now on nobody would arrange your days for you by timetable, and every road would have to be walked on your own.

Or perhaps it was simply the reluctance of parting — however clearly your reason tells you that it all goes by in the blink of an eye, when the bell actually rings you still look back, wanting one more look at the people and things that have become so familiar.

Or perhaps it was other reasons, ones I will not spell out. Some things can only stay inside; said aloud they lose their flavour. Some feelings are only fit to be digested quietly late at night, not turned into sentences. Those who understand will understand.

VI. Closing

A last word

So: it has come to this, and let it go on from here along whatever course it should.

However unwilling I am, no one can turn time backwards. Time is a one-way street; it will not slow down by a single second for anyone’s reluctance. You can only stand on the bank looking back the way you came — you cannot swim upstream. What you can do is put everything gathered here into your heart — the knowledge you studied in earnest, the people you lived beside day after day, the wind and the sunlight, the weight of the books that 15 yuan cannot buy back, the creaking luggage on the trolley, the summer sun on the back of your neck as you crouched picking out books — and then turn around and keep walking.

I graduated from Shanxi Jinzhong Institute of Technology on 18 June 2026. From the moment the door of Student Dormitory Building No. 2 closed behind me, I was no longer a student on campus. But the days behind that door, no one can lock away.

谨信博学，经世致用 — those eight characters I will carry for the rest of my life.

And here, in earnest thanks to my friend Dang Jianjiang for the company along the way. For the rest of our lives — I’ll be in your care.

Douyin

Douyin profile

Computer Science and Technology, Class of 2026 · written after leaving campus

Reading the Elements: A Two-Thousand-Year Edifice Built on Five Requests

Sun, 17 May 2026 12:30:00 GMT

1. Why I Read It

At school, geometry meant memorising theorems and drawing auxiliary lines. I never read it as a book, only as a pile of results I had to keep. Why they held, on what grounds they held — the teacher did not say, and I did not ask.

Years later a question came: a book used as a textbook for two thousand years, and held up as a model of truth, what does it stand on? I opened it with that question and met two surprises.

One was the beginning. What it sets at the front is not five self-evident truths but five requests it asks you to grant. The other was its first proposition: to construct an equilateral triangle, over in a few steps — yet I stared at the figure for a long while before I saw the unstated assumption it quietly used.

2. The Skeleton First

The Elements runs to thirteen books and about 465 propositions (the standard count is 465). It was put together around 300 BC and is a great tidying-up of the geometry known in Alexandria. Book One opens with 23 definitions, 5 postulates and 5 common notions. Nothing in it uses algebraic symbols: wherever a quantity is handled, it is handled with lines and figures — so whole stretches use a diagram in place of a formula, and reading feels like work with the hands rather than calculation.

The division of labour across the thirteen books, set out as a table:

Book	Contents
1	Definitions, postulates, axioms; basic triangle and parallel-line theorems, including the Pythagorean theorem
2	Algebraic identities handled geometrically, the so-called “geometric algebra”
3–4	The properties of circles, and inscribed and circumscribed polygons
5–6	The theory of proportion and similar figures
7–9	Number theory: divisibility, proportion, and the infinitude of primes
10	The classification of incommensurable magnitudes
11–12	Solid geometry, and volume by the method of exhaustion
13	The construction of the five regular solids, on which the work closes

Expand: the propositions I kept returning to (my own annotations)

I.1: to construct an equilateral triangle. The book’s first proof, only a few steps long
I.5: the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal. Nicknamed the “bridge of asses” in the Middle Ages, said to be the first hurdle in learning geometry
I.47: the Pythagorean theorem. Its figure is called the “bride’s chair”, or the windmill
V: the theory of proportion, handling ratios with magnitudes rather than numbers — technically the hardest book
IX.20: the primes are more than any assigned multitude. The most famous purely number-theoretic proposition in the work
XIII: the construction of the five regular solids, where the work comes to rest

One warning: “postulate” and “axiom” are often lumped together in translation, but they were kept apart. The five postulates concern operations in the world of figures — drawing a line, drawing a circle, intersecting; the five common notions concern general rules about equality. Keep the two separate and every later book tells you what it takes for granted.

3. Passages and Marginalia

On the beginning: the first line is a request

Let it be granted: that from any point to any point a straight line can be drawn.

— Book 1, Postulate 1

My own working translation.

It stands first in the whole book, yet its wording is a “let it be granted” — not a statement of fact but a request for your consent. Euclid builds the foundation as an agreement: grant me these things first, and only then can we begin to talk.

My note: this step is remarkably modern. Any rigorous reasoning has to be clear about where its premises come from. He does not pretend the premises fell from the sky; he lays them on the table and asks whether you accept them.

On the postulate that least looks like one

If a straight line falling on two straight lines makes the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, produced without limit, meet on that side on which the angles are less than the two right angles.

— Book 1, Postulate 5

My own working translation.

着重点The first four postulates are short and matter-of-fact: two points joined by a line, a line extended, a circle drawn, all right angles equal. Only the fifth is long and tangled, and looks nothing like something “obvious”. For over two thousand years people tried to derive it from the others, until in the nineteenth century someone turned around and admitted it: not a necessity, merely one choice among several.

My note: this awkward postulate later grew into the whole field of non-Euclidean geometry. The least conspicuous assumption became the most fruitful one.

On the first proof: an assumption no one wrote down

On a given finite straight line, to construct an equilateral triangle.

— Book 1, Proposition 1

My own working translation.

This is the first proof in the book, so short it is almost invisible. Draw two circles with the ends of the line as centres, take the point where they meet, join it up, and the triangle is done.

The step hidden inside the figure

Euclid’s construction takes the intersection of the two circles. But search all five postulates and none guarantees that two circles will meet — he assumed it, without saying so. More than two thousand years later, when Hilbert rewrote the axioms of geometry, he added a batch of just such tacit premises. This is not fault-finding; it is seeing one thing clearly: the most careful book will still leave a gap exactly where matters seem obvious¹.

My note: only here did I understand that “rigour” does not mean having no holes, but putting the holes somewhere you are bound to run into them.

On the most famous proposition of all

In right-angled triangles, the square on the side subtending the right angle is equal to the squares on the sides containing the right angle.

— Book 1, Proposition 47

My own working translation.

笔记==Put into today’s notation, this is a2+b2=c2a^2+b^2=c^2a2+b2=c2.== But Euclid uses no letters: he draws three squares and, by cutting and pasting, shows how the large square is made from the two small ones. One and the same fact — symbols on one side, a figure on the other — and he chose the figure.

My note: the diagram was called the “bride’s chair” in the Middle Ages, and some thought it looked like a windmill. The name got grander and grander; the point is a single line — rearrange it, and the area is conserved.

On an unexpected book

The primes are more than any assigned multitude of prime numbers.

— Book 9, Proposition 20

My own working translation.

着重点A book that talks of figures and segments from beginning to end suddenly gives a purely number-theoretic claim. The proof is startlingly clean: take any list of primes, multiply them together and add one; the result is either itself prime, or divisible by a prime not on the list — either way, there is a prime beyond the list.

My note: this book shows the temperament of the work best. It is not about how striking any single result is; it is about how far the act of proof itself can be pushed.

Before you start: two small things

One is the edition. In translation, “postulate”, “axiom” and “definition” are not handled consistently; the same place may be rendered as a postulate in one version and a hypothesis in another, and reading gets tangled. To choose a version, turn to the opening of Book One and see how it lays out those three headings at the top; that tells you the book’s temperament. The other is method. It uses no symbols and relies on construction and cutting-and-pasting, so keep paper and a pencil nearby — drawing a figure through once is much faster than reading the words through once².

4. What I Put to Use

In a proof, first trace which earlier propositions it uses. Every proposition stands on results already proved. After finishing one, jot down the numbers it cites; across a book or two, the dependencies show up as a web — and you see why it had to begin from postulates.
Keep paper and pencil and draw the figures. This book was written for the hands. Two circles, a secant, a few squares: drawn, and merely imagined, are two different things. Whenever you read “to construct”, stop and draw.
Treat the postulates as agreed premises, not as truths. Read that way, “can the fifth postulate be changed” stops being an idle question and becomes one that naturally arises — and in time it really was changed, and really did grow a new geometry.

5. Closing

Closing the book undid a prejudice: I had thought a book like this has no “author”, only results. Having read it, I see it as an artisan’s record from the workshop — first settling the premises with you, then laying the whole building up step by step, and at the last book still keeping one move back, closing with the five regular solids.

Next: the Odyssey. A book that asks you to follow proof step by step is done; the next asks you to follow a drifting step by step. One takes “certainty” to its limit, the other turns “accident” into a life; I want to see how far apart the two kinds of stepping really are.

Footnotes

The gap lasted a long while: more than two thousand two hundred years lie between Euclid and Hilbert. When Hilbert rewrote the axioms of geometry in 1899, he supplied a batch of premises that had been assumed but never stated, among them the intersection of circles. The case is often used to make one point: what we call “obvious” is usually just “never questioned”. ↩
On the names: in Euclid’s Greek, the first five are αἰτήματα, literally “things asked for”, hence “postulates”; the later ones are κοιναὶ ἔννοιαι, “common notions”, hence “axioms”. Different renderings leave readers with a different sense of which items are requests and which are shared agreements. ↩

Reading the Iliad: It Opens With Wrath and Closes With a Funeral

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:20:00 GMT

1. Why I Read It

I first opened the Iliad for the wooden horse. By Book Two I was stuck: it is a catalogue of ships, dozens of lines of tribes, captains and hulls, with the story standing still. I shut the book and decided it was meant for scholars.

What pulled me back was a structural fact I only learned later: the Trojan War lasted ten years, and this poem takes about fifty days from its final year. It is in no hurry to finish a war; it cuts out one small stretch and watches it in slow motion.

Only when I finished did I see that the weight in that stretch is not the fighting. The first line names not a battle but a wrath; the most famous hero, Achilles, spends most of the poem sulking in his tent; and the poem’s last line falls on a funeral.

2. The Skeleton First

The Iliad is one of the two Homeric epics, in twenty-four books, about 15,700 lines in the standard text (the usual count is 15,693), in dactylic hexameter. The action sits in the tenth year of the Trojan War and spans roughly fifty days. It does not begin at the beginning: the abduction of Helen, the sailing of the fleet — none of that is retold. The poet assumes you already know it, and starts straight from a quarrel.

People who cannot get through it are usually the ones the names defeat. I gave myself a table of the books:

Book	What happens
1	The quarrel: Agamemnon takes Briseis, Achilles withdraws
2	Agamemnon tests the army, and the famous catalogue of ships
3–4	Paris and Menelaus duel; the truce breaks at once
5–7	Diomedes runs riot; Hector and Ajax exchange gifts
8–10	Troy gains the upper hand; a night raid
11–15	Agamemnon is wounded; the tide turns toward Troy
16	Patroclus goes out in Achilles’ armour and dies at Hector’s hand
17–19	A fight over one body; Achilles gets new armour and makes peace with Agamemnon
20–22	Achilles returns, kills Hector, and drags the body around the walls
23	Funeral games for Patroclus
24	Old Priam slips into the enemy camp to ransom his son’s body; the poem ends

Expand: two armies, a few faces (my own annotations)

The Greek side: Agamemnon, the commander, and the earlier fault is mostly his; Achilles, the strongest fighter and the one who holds a grudge best; Patroclus, Achilles’ friend, whose death in Book Sixteen weighs the most; Odysseus, the man of many turns, on whom both the embassy and the night raid depend; Ajax, the strongest of the strong-arm kind
The Trojan side: Hector, the pillar of the city and one of the poem’s true protagonists; Priam, the old king, who only steps on stage in the last book; Paris, who brought the trouble, a good archer and a poor fighter; Andromache, Hector’s wife, the most moving voice in Book Six
The unaligned side: the gods. They each have favourites and even intervene on the field — while reading, remember that not everyone taking a side is human

One warning: do not come here looking for a theory of war. The poem is not an argument but a cost report: how wrath falls first on one’s own side, and how heroism and cruelty grow on the same tree.

3. Passages and Marginalia

On wrath: the poem’s first word

Sing, goddess, the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles, the ruinous wrath that brought countless sorrows on the Achaeans.

— Book 1, opening

My own working translation.

The first sentence of the poem sings neither a war nor a hero, but one man’s wrath. Almost everything afterwards can be traced to it: whom he is angry at, how long he stays angry, and what he does once the anger cools.

笔记One detail repays thought: the poet asks not to “tell the whole war” but to “sing this wrath”. A poem devoted to a single fit of anger became the source of the whole Western literature of war.

On home: the passage where Hector returns to the city

Hector comes back into the city to say goodbye to Andromache. She holds their child and weeps, begging him not to go back to the front; he answers that he could not face the men and women of Troy if he skulked away from battle like a coward. He reaches for the boy, but the child wails at the horsehair crest on his helmet, and both parents laugh. He prays that the boy will one day be stronger than his father, and that people will say he is far better than the man who begot him. (paraphrase)

— Book 6, Hector and Andromache

My own working paraphrase.

着重点This is the quietest passage in the poem, and the one that cuts deepest. The poet lets the greatest “enemy” be a father first, outside the fighting. Once you have seen Hector’s home, the moment his body is dragged in Book Twenty-two lands much harder.

My note: by this point the epic no longer sorts friend from enemy. The poet gives the Trojans a hearth and a cradle, and in passing gives the reader a position — it becomes very hard to cheer cleanly for either side.

On war: what Sarpedon says to his comrade

Sarpedon says to Glaucus: my friend, if we could escape this war and never die, I would not be pushing to the front myself; but since the gates of death stand always near, we can only go forward — either to hand the glory to another, or to win it from him. (paraphrase)

— Book 12, Sarpedon to Glaucus

My own working paraphrase.

危险This is the nearest the poem comes to a “war ethics”, and the most honest it ever is. It offers no just reason for war, only a fact: since everyone dies, glory is used to fill the gap death leaves.

My note: the speech sounds like an argument for courage, but underneath it is a confession — no reason can be found, so reputation is put in its place. It reads as generous, and carries a chill.

On principle: Achilles refuses the embassy

Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is the man who hides one thing in his heart and says another.

— Book 9, Achilles’ reply

My own working translation.

This line turns Achilles from a sulking fighter into a man with a principle. Agamemnon sends a lavish embassy to make peace, and he refuses it. What he says is not “the price is too low”, but — gifts can cover a loss, not the man who sent them.

My note: here he first shows that he knows he will die. He says his mother told him two fates: stay and live long but unknown, or win honour and cut life short. He chose the second. That principle is exactly why he will later weep aloud.

On giving back: the meeting at the end

Old Priam slips into the enemy camp at night, kneels before Achilles, who killed his son, and clasps his knees and kisses the hands that killed his boy. Achilles thinks of his own father, and the two men weep together. (paraphrase)

— Book 24, Priam and Achilles

My own working paraphrase.

The most famous scene in the poem is not on the battlefield but inside a tent. The victor who was dragging a body in rage a moment ago now sits and cries with his enemy’s father.

Why a funeral can end the poem

The poem does not close on a victory. The brief truce between Achilles and Priam is not argued into being; it comes from two men who both remember what they stand to lose. The truce lasts twelve days, and the city will fall — but the poet withholds all that, and lets the last image rest beside the burning pyre. The final line reads: so they busied themselves with the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses.

Before you start: editions and names

The Chinese versions come mainly from two hands, Luo Niansheng and Chen Zhongmei. The first leans on transliteration with a grave, speakable rhythm; the second carries denser notes and suits a first reading for cross-checking. Their name-spellings differ, and mixing the two gets confusing. There are far more English versions, with names running in two lines, Greek (Achilleus, Hektor) and Latin (Achilles, Hector); in this piece I have used the more familiar one. To choose a version, turn to Book Twenty-four and see how it handles the “hands that were kissed” — that passage is a fair sign of the whole¹.

4. What I Put to Use

Build the “fifty days” timeline before learning the names. There is no need to grind through the catalogue of ships at the start. Go once around the twenty-four books to see which stretch of events each covers, then fill in the names; it is far less tiring than being drowned by them on page one.
Read an epic aloud. A hexameter line barely forms in silent reading. Even in translation, read it at the pauses the version marks; when you reach fixed epithets like “Hector, tamer of horses” or “Odysseus, of many turns”, the line breaks surface by themselves.
When Achilles rages, watch where the cost lands. His anger burns his own side first: the Greeks lose battle after battle, and Patroclus goes to his death because of it. Keep an eye on that, and the poem will not read as a heroes’ anthem.

5. Closing

Closing the book undid a prejudice: I had thought an epic was a war’s publicity. It does the opposite — it refuses to speak for the victors and keeps its lens on the dead, the living, and everyone on both sides who is losing someone. A poem from some two thousand seven hundred years ago that dares to let the winner end in tears carries weight by itself.

Next: the Elements. One book about war ends with a funeral; one book about figures begins from a few definitions and walks downward step by step. One writes cost into verse, the other writes proof into a grid; I want to see how “certainty” tastes when it is read.

Footnotes

On the “Homeric question”: whether these two epics come from one hand has been debated for a long time. The “analysts” hold that they were assembled by many people across many ages; the “unitarians” that a single poet shaped each whole. No need to pick a side first — read for the poem itself. ↩

Reading Faust: He Rewrote “In the Beginning Was the Word” Four Times, and Landed on the Deed

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 12:50:00 GMT

1. Why I Read It

I first read Faust for the “deal with the devil”, expecting a story of a soul sold. A few pages in, I surrendered: it is a verse drama, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German, with several translations in between, and it read haltingly.

What made me pick it up again was a concrete fact: Goethe worked on this book for nearly sixty years. He began in his twenties and kept at it until shortly before his death in his eighties; Part Two was published only after he died. One man spending almost a whole life on another man’s life carries weight by itself.

This time the first detail I noted was neither the devil nor the love story but the translation at the start: Faust, in his study, translating the Gospel of John, rewrites “In the beginning was the Word” four times over and lands on “In the beginning was the Deed”. Only then did I realise that the first scene of this great drama is really about how a single sentence should be translated.

2. The Skeleton First

Faust is Goethe’s verse drama, written across nearly sixty years. Part One appeared in 1808; Part Two only after Goethe’s death in 1832. More than twenty years separate them, and they read almost like two works: Part One is concentrated and hot, circling the study, the town and the tragedy of Gretchen; Part Two is ornate and symbolic, moving through the imperial court, myth and Greece. The play is not there to “deliver a lesson”; it lets one man err again and again, and rise again and again.

Telling the two parts apart is the easiest way into the book:

	Part One	Part Two
Published	1808	1832, after the author’s death
Setting	Study, town, prison	Court, myth, Greece
Companions	Mephistopheles and Gretchen	Mephistopheles and Helen
Manner	Concentrated, hot	Elaborate, symbolic
Ending	Tragedy left on earth	Angels carry the soul away

Expand: a work written across a whole life (my own annotations)

Around the 1770s: the earliest “Urfaust” takes shape, the characters already there
1790: part of it published as Faust, A Fragment
1808: Part One properly published
The next twenty-odd years: Part Two largely set aside, touched now and then
1832: Part Two published after Goethe’s death, and the book closes

One warning: do not read Faust as a moral figure. He is neither good nor bad; what the wager bets on is not whether he will fall but whether he will stop. He is allowed to err, so long as he keeps pushing forward.

3. Passages and Marginalia

On “the beginning”: rewriting “In the beginning was the Word” four times

Geschrieben steht: »Im Anfang war das Wort!« Hier stock ich schon! Wer hilft mir weiter fort? Ich kann das Wort so hoch unmöglich schätzen, Ich muß es anders übersetzen, Wenn ich vom Geiste recht erleuchtet bin. Geschrieben steht: Im Anfang war der Sinn. Bedenke wohl die erste Zeile, Daß deine Feder sich nicht übereile! Ist es der Sinn, der alles wirkt und schafft? Es sollte stehn: Im Anfang war die Kraft! Doch, auch indem ich dieses niederschreibe, Schon warnt mich was, daß ich dabei nicht bleibe. Mir hilft der Geist! Auf einmal seh ich Rat Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang war die Tat!

— Part One, “Study”

My own working translation: It is written: “In the beginning was the Word!” Here I already falter — who will help me on? I cannot prize the Word so highly; I must translate it otherwise, if I am rightly enlightened by the spirit. It is written: In the beginning was the Sense. Consider well the first line, that your pen do not rush. Is it the Sense that works and creates all things? It should read: In the beginning was the Power! Yet even as I write this down, something warns me I will not stay with it. The spirit helps me! Suddenly I see the way, and write boldly: In the beginning was the Deed!

These dozen lines are the first scene of the book and its crux. Wort, Sinn, Kraft, Tat — each sinks a step lower, all the way from “saying” down to “doing”. Faust is not fussing over wording; he is finding a position he can stand on.

着重点Goethe turns a sentence translated for a thousand years into a stage, and lets the translator change his mind in public. The whole play’s direction presses into these four revisions: “Word” is too still; only “Deed” matches the restlessness he feels right now.

On “the wager”: one sentence decides it

Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen: Verweile doch! du bist so schön! Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen, Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn!

— Part One, “Study”

My own working translation: If ever I say to the moment: Stay a while, you are so fair! Then you may clap me in chains, then I will gladly go to my ruin!

危险This is the most famous line in the book, and the clause of a contract. His confidence comes precisely from his restlessness: Mephistopheles bets he can be settled, Faust bets he never will be. Note the phrasing — “if ever I should say” — the moment has not arrived; he is asking for a future one.

My note: in Part Two he does say it, but as “I might say” — a moment he does not yet own, only glimpsed in imagination. Whether the wager is won keeps the whole book busy until the last page.

On “two souls”: one man split in two

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust, Die eine will sich von der andern trennen; Die eine hält, in derber Liebeslust, Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen; Die andere hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.

— Part One, “Before the Gate”

My own working translation: Two souls, alas, dwell within my breast, and one would part from the other; the one clings to the world with clutching organs, in crude delight of love; the other lifts itself by force from the dust toward the fields of high ancestors.

“Two souls” is not a figure of speech but the mechanics of the book. Every episode — study, wager, love, power — can be read as these two forces pulling against each other. He is most human when he sinks; he is most like what he wants to become when he climbs.

My note: reading this, I thought of the translation at the start. Wort is the upward half, Tat the downward half; in the very first scene he has already chosen where the tension will come from.

On “theory”: an oft-quoted piece of mockery

Grau ist alle Theorie, Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.

— Part One, “Study” (Mephistopheles to the student who comes to enrol)

My own working translation: Grey is all theory, and green the golden tree of life.

These two lines are often quoted as encouragement, yet the speaker is Mephistopheles, and the tone is double-edged: it sounds like advice against book-learning, and also like an excuse for not thinking. Put it back in place and Goethe looks far less naive — he has the devil say a truth, and leaves you to weigh it.

On “salvation”: two lines at the close

Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, Den können wir erlösen.

— Part Two, chorus of angels

My own working translation: Whoever strives with all his might, him we can save.

Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns hinan.

— Part Two, closing lines

My own working translation: The eternal feminine draws us upward.

The first is the verdict, the second the elegy. The wager runs across two books, and in the end it is not settled by anything magnificent Faust does but by a sentence of judgement: as long as he still strives, he has not lost. That is not forgiveness so much as an acknowledgement of the process.

My note: only at the end did I feel the weight of that opening “In the beginning was the Deed”. The whole book is a gloss on the one word — moving a man from “what does he believe” to “what does he do”.

Two things to settle before you read

One is language. In the German, the weight of Wort (word), Sinn (sense), Kraft (power), Tat (deed) is hard to carry over whole into a translation; keep the four senses in mind, or the translation scene will look baffling. The other is length. Do not expect to read Part Two straight through; it is more like a long masquerade, with figures and scenes changing constantly, and it comes clearer if you stop every so often¹.

4. Lessons and Practice

Convert “what to believe” into “what to do”. The point Faust’s revision lands on is to bring abstract belief back down to concrete action. My own rough rule: when something is unclear, take the smallest step first; the answer usually shows up after you start moving.
Recognise the two souls in your chest. The half that wants ease and the half that wants distance are often both present. Do not rush to kill one off; acknowledge both, then ask which half gets to take one more step this week. That costs less than forcing yourself to be positive.
Be wary of “grey theory” — and of whoever says it. The famous line comes from the devil’s mouth. Whenever a voice tells you not to overthink, first see what the speaker wants you to go and do.

5. Closing

Closing the book, I dropped my first prejudice — that it was a legend of a soul sold. It is nearer a long experiment, and what it tests is whether one man can keep erring and still move toward the light. Goethe gives him no clean ending, only a fair sentence: while you still strive, there is still room.

Next: the Iliad. Faust follows the inner order of a single life; that one is the wrath and honour of a single war, a wholly different noise.

Footnotes

There is a textual point too: Part Two had no fixed text until after Goethe’s death, and scholars still debate the order and attribution of individual passages. Do not insist on the “one correct reading”; read for the story itself first. ↩

Nanzhai Park the Day After Snow, and the Woods a Nursery Left Behind

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 13:20:00 GMT

In Taiyuan the snow comes at night in December.

It began late on the 11th, and by the 12th it had turned to moderate snow — the weather service warned of heavy falls in places, with a north-westerly wind at force four to six and gusts above seven, and a daytime high of −1°C. On the morning of the 13th I opened the curtains to a clear sky and a forecast of −10°C to −1°C, that is 14°F to 30°F¹. Indoors the radiators were holding the room above 18°C: Taiyuan’s statutory heating season runs from 1 November to 31 March, and this year the cold came early, so the whole city was switched on on 19 October, twelve days ahead of schedule². Thirty degrees between inside and outside. A gap like that makes sitting still difficult. So I went out to see Nanzhai Park under snow.

When I told a friend I was going to Nanzhai, the first thing he said was: what is there to look at there in winter? There is something. The hundred-odd species and nearly three hundred thousand plants in that ground do not disappear when winter arrives; they simply move into another register. Once the pretty season is over, the skeleton shows.

Boarding at Shengli Bridge East

Getting there is not hard. From Shengli Bridge East the 2, 36, 37, 907 and 841 buses all run out this way, along with several branch routes, and they stop at both the west and the north gates. I took the earliest one.

Half the snow on the bus window had melted, and water ran down the glass in threads, cutting the street outside into strips. The further north we went, the lower the buildings got, and the more the ground looked as though nobody had touched it: apart from the main road, everything was one continuous white. Just before my stop the bus turned west, and the park’s north wall slid past alongside the road, carrying a line of snow along the top of it, very long.

The Shape of the Place

Nanzhai Park sits at 133 Xinlan Road in Jiancaoping District — the same stretch of road is also called Datong Road, Nanzhai village section. Its predecessor was the Nanzhai Nursery, laid out in 1956: 250,000 square metres, with the ground falling from south to north³. In April 2005 the city decided to turn the nursery into a public park; work began on 28 June, finished in a hundred days, and the gates opened in early October that year. One very plain reason behind it: the north of the city had no general park at all. It has been enlarged since, and the parks department’s more recent figure for the total area is 361,000 square metres.

Its shape is not the usual park shape. A long east–west strip crosses a north–south rectangle at right angles — a letter T, or a corridor that ends by opening into a yard. The north gate is at one end of the corridor, and the pigeon square, the pond and the shaded path are all crowded near it; the rectangle in the south is the main body, and inside it run the peony garden, the herbaceous peony garden, the lotus pond, the rose garden, the herb garden, the vegetable garden. You cannot tell from the gate. You have to walk to the crossing point before the length of the place becomes clear.

Pigeon Square: Few People, Plenty of Pigeons

Not far in from the north gate there is a patch of concrete where the pigeons come down. In summer there is a fixed procedure: buy a bag of corn kernels, open your hand and cup it into a bowl, and a pigeon will come whirring over, hover, take one kernel and go. The bolder ones land on your fingertips, grip, and eat at leisure. The procedure is the same in winter. It just runs half a beat slower.

There were four of us in the square that morning, counting me. A thin cover of snow, and the pigeons had printed it with a fine scribble of tracks, as if somebody had scraped at paper with the tip of a knife. The kernels sank half out of sight the moment they landed. The birds look fatter in winter than in summer, all of them fluffed out — their own rough method of getting through: trap the air in the feathers and make a quilt of it. One grey bird ate two kernels and hopped away to the roof of the pigeon shed, where it stopped moving altogether, neck drawn down into its wings until only the line of its back was left.

The birds were not cold. I was. I took my gloves off for two photographs, and my fingers stiffened so fast I could barely hold the phone.

The Pond, the Geese, and a Plaque That Reads “Xiang Tian Ge”

South of the square lies a pond. A few white geese used to stand on the bank, bulky, swaying one step at a time, not much afraid of anybody. That day the surface was frozen, with snow lying on the ice, so white you could not see where water ended and bank began. The geese had retreated to the loose stones on the edge; the stones were frosted and slippery. One of them took two steps, failed to get its footing, flung its wings open to brace itself, then slid into the water slowly and awkwardly. Only one small patch near the bank, out of the wind, was still open. The flock crowded in there, necks bent, looking for something to eat.

Reeds grow in the pond — two metres tall in summer, packed so tight you cannot see through them. In winter they dry to the colour of straw, and when the wind comes past, the whole stand rattles, a sound as dry as paper. A zigzag bridge crosses the pond, and on the plaque at its head are three characters: xiang tian ge — “singing up at the sky”. From Luo Binwang’s poem about the goose, the one that begins with three repeated syllables. Not a deep reference. An accurate one.

Chairs Cut From Whole Logs

Coming back over the bridge, the path along the bank has a few straight-backed seats, some for one person, some for two. Up close you see how they were made: not bought and bolted down, but cut out of whole logs two metres long and as thick as your arms can reach, so that the backrest is simply the log’s own curve. Nobody sits on them in winter; the snow lies on the seats and does the useful work of drawing out the grain and the cut faces, thick where the wood was carved deep, sliding off where the bark was left on.

On the same walk stands the glass pavilion out in the middle of the water — six faces, with a long bridge reaching sideways to the shore. Glass is the first thing you notice in a snowscape, because it keeps no light at all; it gives everything back.

Further south, a few large millstones stand in a line up the central green strip. They are thick, taller than a person, and bored through the middle with square holes twenty centimetres across. The group has a name: tian yuan di fang, “round sky, square earth”. Not far off, in the lawn, stand two rectangular frames, one large and one small, called “the China frame”: step inside, have your picture taken, and the camera stamps it with Nanzhai Park’s own watermark. Both of these read better in winter than in summer. In summer the green buries them; in winter the snow draws their outlines. A circle is a circle. A square is a square.

Expanded: the park’s ten named sights, and what becomes of them in December

Rhinoceros Looking at Flowers — a landscape stone on the west square. In spring the flowers around it earn the name; in winter a stone is a stone, with a ridge of snow across its back.
The Turtle Offers Longevity — the name involves a turtle, so presumably a group of shaped rocks. I passed it without looking closely; under snow there is indeed something of the curve of a shell.
Round Sky, Square Earth — the millstones. Sharpest outlines of the year.
The China Frame — two frames, large and small. Step in and you become the picture.
Boardwalk for Flower-Watching — a stretch of timber boardwalk. Frosted, it turns out to be steadier underfoot than the flagstones.
Reeds and Rejoicing Ducks — the reeds and waterfowl of the pond. The reeds are dead; the ducks are all on the one patch that has not frozen.
A Sea of Purple Loosestrife — in summer it lines both sides of the path. In winter only the cut stubble is left, and it is impossible to see where the word “sea” came from.
Moonlight on the Lotus Pond — ice, plus broken stalks, is the most painterly corner of the park in winter.
Willow Waves — a stretch of path between weeping willows. The “waves” need leaves; right now there are only a few dozen hanging branches, each carrying snow.
Open Woods and Lawn — the most concentrated piece of nursery manners in the park, wide gaps between the trees, snow lying flat across them.

The Woods the Nursery Left Behind

The trees are the part of Nanzhai Park that least resembles a park.

A nursery grows saplings, and its pruning habits accumulate over generations, which leaves the place stylistically mixed: poplars and willows grown very tall, shrubs trained into spheres, pines trained into umbrellas. None of these shapes are visible in summer, when leaves cover everything. In winter, with the leaves down, the work of the secateurs is exposed, line by line. Poplar branches against snow look like pencil underdrawing, every stroke straight; willow branches hang heavy with snow, dragging lower than they can really go; the umbrella pines take the weight and go white with bent shoulders.

The park’s own description of a Taiyuan winter — “the earth wrapped in silver, rime on the branches clear as crystal” — is not an exaggeration. Rime is thickest before ten in the morning. Once the sun is out it starts dropping, and every fallen piece leaves a small pit in the snow. Beside the wood stand a few spotted giraffes, heads up, eating leaves that are not there; snow settles on their necks, and half of each body has gone white.

In 2010 and 2011 a batch of trees was planted here: some fifty pines, including Huashan and creeping pines, more than thirty ginkgos, a dozen dragon-head cypresses, plus a large stretch of new lawn⁴. Those ginkgos should have trunks thicker than an arm by now. Their branches angle upwards, so snow will not sit on them; it slides off with a soft rustle.

The Southern Half: A Catalogue With Nothing In It

The rectangle in the south holds a run of specialised gardens, all named for seasons. In winter what remains is the signage and the beds.

Garden	The season in the name	What it is in December
Tree peony / herbaceous peony	The flower season of April and May	Short stems, tight buds, like fists clenched shut
Lotus pond	A whole summer	Ice, broken stalks poking out through the snow
Rose garden	Repeating until autumn	Cut back to the base; stubs and thorns
Sea of purple loosestrife	July and August, lining the path	Stubble at ground level, unidentifiable after one snowfall
Vegetable garden	Picking time	Empty rows, snowy beds, straw rope still tied to the frames
Herb garden	Worth a look all year	See below

The herb garden is the newest name on the list. In July 2024 it reopened after being enlarged to 800 square metres, and the parks department made it a place that is at once ornamental, instructive, knowledgeable and playful — the first of its kind in Taiyuan’s park system — planted with medicinal herbs suited to the local climate⁵. In summer you look at the flowers. In winter the stems and leaves are dead and only the wooden labels are left standing in the ground: name, family, the part used, its properties. In fact it reads better in winter, because words are all there is. Bupleurum and codonopsis, two of Shanxi’s signature medicines, are written on the labels nearest the path.

The “one park, one speciality” rural culture festival has been held annually for years. 2024 was the sixteenth; this summer should have been the seventeenth, and I came too late for it. The park’s traditional-medicine garden, farming-culture garden and science corner are all opened free of charge during the festival.

Coming in Winter Is When You Understand What This Place Was

Nanzhai Park has hardly any pavilions. It is not polished: the grass grows where it likes, the paths bend where they like, and the parks department describes its character as “plain, natural, with a hint of the countryside”. That is not a shortcoming. It is a record of where the place came from — a nursery has no need to be beautiful. A nursery needs to produce saplings.

The saplings raised on this ground in 1956 were meant to be dug up and carried off to other streets, other roadsides. The ones still standing here are the ones that were never taken away, and they have grown into the park’s frame. From 1956 to 2005 is forty-nine years. In four more years, this generation of trees will be seventy.

I cannot point to the one planted in 1956, but a few of them must still be here. They have seen the nursery and they have seen the park — two entirely different identities on the same ground. The people have changed over several times. The rings have not stopped.

On the Way Out

At half past three the sun dropped west, and the light coming off the snow turned from white to grey. I went back to the north gate to wait for the bus, took my hands out of my pockets to check the time, and found my fingertips had no feeling left in them; the sign announcing the next bus was still lit, at least.

The snow on the platform had been trampled into a grey layer. Looking back at the gate, it was white and quiet. All the summer names — reeds and rejoicing ducks, moonlight on the lotus pond, sea of loosestrife, boardwalk for flower-watching, willow waves — had been folded away and pinned to the guide map beside the north gate to wait for next year. I plan to come back in spring, when it will be the peony garden’s and the herb garden’s turn to open.

Practical notes: Nanzhai Park is at 133 Xinlan Road, Jiancaoping District, Taiyuan — the Datong Road, Nanzhai village stretch — and admission is free; winter opening hours are set by the park, so check before you go. From Shengli Bridge East, take the 2, 36, 37, 907 or 841, or a branch route, to the west or north gate; the 15 and 314 also stop nearby. In winter the things worth seeing are the exposed shapes of the trees, the frozen water and a pigeon square with almost nobody in it. After snow, wear shoes with tread: the loose stones by the pond and the zigzag bridge turn to thin ice as soon as the snow melts. Opening arrangements for the herb and peony gardens change with the season, so it is worth a glance at the park’s own notice first.

Footnotes

This spell of snow ran from 11 to 13 December 2025. The main precipitation fell between the night of the 11th and the daytime of the 12th, 4 to 8 millimetres in total; on the 12th the day began overcast and cleared to cloud, with moderate snow and heavy falls in places, a north-westerly wind at force 4 to 6 and gusts above 7, and a high of −1°C. From the night of the 12th into the daytime of the 13th it cleared from cloud to fine, between −10°C and −1°C. ↩
December in Taiyuan averages about −3.1°C, with an extreme December minimum of −23.3°C; January, the coldest month, averages −5.5°C. The statutory heating season is 1 November to 31 March, and the standard indoor temperature is 18±2°C. ↩
The nursery was established in 1956 on 250,000 square metres of ground falling from south to north, with winding roads. In April 2005 the city decided to convert it into a park; work began on 28 June and finished a hundred days later, opening in early October that year. More recent parks-department material gives the total area as 361,000 square metres. ↩
The planting notes for those two years also mention wildflower mixes and a rapeseed display, most of it the result of year-by-year adjustment; they are not a full botanical inventory. ↩
Bupleurum and codonopsis were named by the Taiyuan parks authority in a reply to a political consultative proposal as herbs suited to the local climate, to be planted in the park’s traditional-medicine section with explanatory labels. The enlarged herb garden opened in July 2024 at 800 square metres. ↩

Reading A New Account of Tales of the World: It Argues Nothing, and Lets Thirty-Six Doors Grade an Age

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 13:00:00 GMT

1. Why I Read It

The first time I opened Shishuo Xinyu I went in for “Wei-Jin refinement”, expecting ancients’ gossip. The first category, “Virtuous Conduct”, put me to sleep — pages of grave pronouncements, nothing like the free-spirited figures I imagined. I shelved it a long time.

What pulled me back was one entry in “Wilful Conduct”: Wang Ziyou, taken one night by a wish to see a friend, rowed for a whole night; at dawn he reached the man’s gate, then turned back, saying he had set out on a mood and the mood was spent. The odd thing about this book is that it never explains itself.

It skips even the step of arguing. Other old books hurry to hand down conclusions; this one records a single remark or gesture and files the person under a door. On this re-reading I carried one question: how can fragments with no beginning or end piece together an age? The answer narrowed to the thirty-six doors. The door’s name is the verdict, and the book’s position sits entirely in its table of contents.

2. The Skeleton First

The standard text of Shishuo Xinyu has thirty-six categories and about 1,130 entries (counts differ between editions), recording the words and deeds of notable men from the late Han to the Eastern Jin. The compilation is usually credited to Liu Yiqing, a prince of the Liu Song, though it likely came from retainers under him. It is neither official history nor, really, fiction. It reads like an archive filed by “standard of judgement”: set up thirty-six kinds of appraisal, then sort people into them.

Anyone who cannot enter it is usually reading it as a storybook, page by page. Learn the names of the doors first, because the door names are the age’s standard of judgement:

Common categories	What it really asks	What to watch for
Virtuous Conduct	Is this person to be trusted?	The verdict is often in the onlookers’ reactions
Speech and Conversation	Is the remark well made?	A good line often is the whole entry
Broad-Mindedness, Uprightness	Is the bearing steady under pressure?	The quieter the reaction, the higher the score
Wilful Conduct, Arrogance	Does the way of life keep the rules?	The more it breaks them, the likelier it is praise
Extravagance, Infatuation	Where does a person come off the rails?	The category name itself is the verdict

Expand: which of the thirty-six doors to open first (my own annotations)

Virtuous Conduct: the first door, the highest standard, the gravest tone
Speech and Conversation, Affairs of State, Letters and Scholarship: beside Virtuous Conduct, the old frame of Confucius’s “four subjects”
Uprightness, Broad-Mindedness, Insight, Appreciation and Praise, Ranking and Evaluation: a slab of doors about judging people
Admonitions, Quick Perception, Early Wisdom, Uninhibited Boldness, Appearance and Bearing: specific labels for temperament
Wilful Conduct, Arrogance, Mocking and Jesting, Slighting: the notables’ tempers, the liveliest reading
Extravagance, Stinginess, Irascibility, Infatuation, Enmity: the book’s later, “negative” cases

One warning: do not take Shishuo Xinyu for reliable history. Many entries come from rumour and elaboration; the same event, filed under different doors, can be judged in opposite ways. It records not “what actually happened” but “how that age appraised people”.

3. Passages and Marginalia

On “friendship”: four characters end a friendship

管宁、华歆共园中锄菜，见地有片金，管挥锄与瓦石不异，华捉而掷去之。又尝同席读书，有乘轩冕过门者，宁读如故，歆废书出看。宁割席分坐曰：子非吾友也。

— Virtuous Conduct

My own working translation: Guan Ning and Hua Xin were hoeing vegetables together when they turned up a piece of gold: Guan Ning hoed on as if it were a stone, while Hua Xin picked it up and threw it away. Sharing a mat to read, they saw a carriage of office pass the gate; Guan Ning read on, Hua Xin left the book to look. Guan Ning split the mat and sat apart, saying: You are not my friend.

The whole weight presses on the last four characters: You are not my friend. Guan Ning does not call Hua Xin greedy or a seeker of fame. He makes a decision on the spot: since the two disagree about what is worth a glance, they need not share a mat again.

My note: the entry is usually read as “Guan Ning lofty, Hua Xin worldly”. Yet the book files it under its first door, and what it praises is judgement, not fastidiousness — the ability to see, in two small motions, whether two people can get along at all.

On “a way with words”: the grade of a single sentence

谢太傅寒雪日内集，与儿女讲论文义。俄而雪骤，公欣然曰：白雪纷纷何所似？兄子胡儿曰：撒盐空中差可拟。兄女曰：未若柳絮因风起。公大笑乐。

— Speech and Conversation

My own working translation: On a cold snowy day the Grand Tutor Xie gathered the household to discuss the meaning of texts. The snow came on suddenly, and he said with pleasure: What does falling snow resemble? His nephew Huer said: It might be compared to salt scattered in the air. His niece said: Not so good as willow catkins rising in the wind. The Grand Tutor laughed aloud.

着重点The entry records three sentences, a scoring done on the spot. “Salt scattered in the air” is not bad — the shape matches. But “willow catkins rising in the wind” brings weight into it: snow does not come down grain by grain, it drifts. Xie An’s laugh is the verdict of that age.

My note: giving an entry’s whole weight to one sentence is the book’s commonest move. It does not say “this girl is very talented”; it leaves only the willow-catkin line, and lets the reader weigh the rest.

On “composure”: holding the feeling down as a craft

谢公与人围棋，俄而谢玄淮上信至。看书竟，默然无言，徐向局。客问淮上利害？答曰：小儿辈大破贼。意色举止，不异于常。

— Broad-Mindedness

My own working translation: The Duke of Xie was playing go when word arrived from Xie Xuan on the Huai River. He read the letter, said nothing, and slowly turned back to the board. His guest asked how matters stood. He answered: My little ones have made a great rout of the rebels. His expression and manner were no different from usual.

This entry is filed under “Broad-Mindedness”, praising the skill of holding a huge event down without letting it show. The letter reports the victory at the Fei River; he reads it and goes on placing stones, answering in a single line. What is telling is that the same affair leaves a tail elsewhere, in the Book of Jin: after his guest left he went inside, and crossing the threshold broke the teeth of his wooden clogs. That loss of composure is what the entry truly wants you to savour.

On “a mood”: a whole night’s journey, then turning back at the gate

王子猷居山阴，夜大雪，眠觉，开室，命酌酒，四望皎然。因起彷徨，咏左思《招隐诗》。忽忆戴安道。时戴在剡，即便夜乘小船就之。经宿方至，造门不前而返。人问其故，王曰：吾本乘兴而行，兴尽而返，何必见戴？

— Wilful Conduct

My own working translation: Wang Ziyou was living in Shanyin. One night heavy snow fell; he woke, opened the room, had wine brought, and looked out on brightness. He paced, reciting Zuo Si’s “Poem of Summoning the Recluse”, and suddenly remembered Dai Andao. Dai was then in Shan, so at night he took a small boat to him. A whole night later he arrived, yet at the gate he turned back. Asked why, Wang said: I came on a mood and the mood is spent, so I return — why must I have seen Dai?

危险Notice it is filed under “Wilful Conduct”, not “Broad-Mindedness”. The same night’s behaviour, under different doors, means different things: under Broad-Mindedness it is steadiness, under Wilful Conduct it is waywardness. The compiler puts it under “Wilful Conduct”, and what is praised is the self-consistent logic — he never pretends he went to see anyone.

My note: only here did I understand how to read this book. It does not judge whether an act is good or bad; it judges which kind it belongs to. Whether Wang Ziyou’s night was worth it depends on which door it falls behind.

On “farewell”: weeping in the way that knew the other best

顾彦先平生好琴，及丧，家人常以琴置灵床上。张季鹰往哭之，不胜其恸，遂径上床，鼓琴，作数曲竟，抚琴曰：顾彦先颇复赏此不？因又大恸，遂不执孝子手而出。

— Grief for the Departed

My own working translation: Gu Yanxian had loved the lute all his life. When he died, his family kept the lute on his spirit bed. Zhang Jiying came to weep for him; grief overwhelmed him, so he went up to the bed and played several pieces, then laid his hand on the lute and said: Yanxian, can you still appreciate this? Then he broke down again, and left without taking the hand of the filial son.

The heaviest words are the last: he left without taking the hand of the filial son. By ritual a mourner grips the son’s hand before leaving; he does not — not from rudeness, but because he wept past ritual. It is filed under “Grief for the Departed”, and what it praises is not that he knew the rules but that he did not finish walking them.

My note: the book’s best moments almost always sit at the tail of a gesture. Pouring wine, playing go, splitting a mat, playing the lute — the gesture finishes, the person stands up, and the author says nothing more.

One thing to remember before you start

The main text is often too short to understand: a bare “You are not my friend”, with who and why left to context. So never read a bare text. The real key is Liu Xiaobiao’s commentary — it fills in a figure’s family, offices and antecedents, and many entries cannot be told apart as praise or blame without it¹.

4. Lessons and Practice

Read the door name first, then the story. Given an entry, see which door it hangs under: praise in “Broad-Mindedness”, blame in “Irascibility” — the same act can be read two ways. Once that is second nature, you ask it of people too: which category does this belong to?
Follow one person across the book. String together the entries on Xie An or Wang Ziyou scattered through the doors — front view, back view, loss of composure. Pieced together they are fuller than any formal biography: the book does not write lives whole, it distributes a life across categories.
Copy sentences, not morals. The book is thick with good lines, one sentence worth an essay. “Not so good as willow catkins rising in the wind”, “the mood is spent, so I return — why must I have seen Dai”: write them out and say them aloud, and they do more than a heap of admonitions.

5. Closing

Closing the book, I dropped an earlier view: I used to think Shishuo Xinyu was a heap of loose sand. Now I think of it as rows of labelled drawers, into which each age drops the person it valued most. It gives no conclusion because it trusts that a few more entries will grow a judgement in you.

Next: Faust. A book exactly its opposite — Shishuo Xinyu records one person in a single line; Faust questions one life across a whole verse drama.

Footnotes

The commentator Liu Xiaobiao lived barely a century after the book’s figures, and the family histories, offices and anecdotes he adds are reliable; later readers can hardly do without him. Some find the commentary too heavy, drowning the main text — but the “brief” main text and the “full” commentary are two sides of one thing: the brevity is the tone of the age, the fullness a later reconstruction. ↩

Reading Walden: Two Years, Two Months and Two Days by a Pond — What Was He Trying to Prove?

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 12:40:00 GMT

1. Why I Read It

The first time I opened Walden was in university, drawn in by the promise of a “poetic life”. I stalled in the opening chapter, “Economy”: why would a book about a pond spend its first dozens of pages on lumber, planks, nails, seed and wages? I had come for scenery and been handed a ledger. I put it back on the shelf unfinished.

What brought me back was moving house. Sorting through my things, I found that most of what I had kept “just in case” ended up at the recycling centre, and at the bottom of a shelf sat this old edition with a ten-year-old library slip still tucked inside. Looking at the date on that slip, a question surfaced: why did Thoreau place the accounts at the very front of the book, and what was he trying to prove?

Once I was inside, I saw that the subject was never really the view. The book runs an experiment, and an auditable one. On 4 July 1845 Thoreau moved into a cabin he had built himself on the shore of Walden Pond; he left on 6 September 1847, two years, two months and two days later¹. The question he set out to test is concrete: if a man strips life back to the essential facts, what does he actually get?

2. The Skeleton First

Walden was first published in 1854 and runs to eighteen chapters. It is not a day-by-day diary; Thoreau re-cut two-plus years by subject — accounts, reading, sounds, solitude, beans, visitors, ice, thaw and so on. Each chapter handles one kind of thing and they can be read out of order. The whole book reads less like an essay than a lab notebook: do the thing once, record it, and let the numbers do the arguing.

Most people who cannot get through it are carrying a single map. I carry three:

Approach	What it tracks	What it solves
By season	The pond through one full year, from freeze to thaw	The book’s skeleton in time
By account	Every expense of the house and the bean-field	Whether “self-sufficiency” really holds up
By phrase	deliberate, simple, recurring	Where a claim gets put into practice

Expand: the eighteen chapters fall into six blocks (my own annotations)

Economy / Where I Lived, and What I Lived For: an opening ledger and a declaration — the book’s foundation
Reading / Sounds / Solitude / Visitors: four things a solitary man does — read, listen, keep still, meet people
The Bean-Field / The Village / The Ponds / Baker Farm: hoeing, wandering, the pond and the neighbours
Higher Laws / Brute Neighbors: spirit and flesh, one chapter rising, one going low
House-Warming / Former Inhabitants / Winter Visitors / Winter Animals / The Pond in Winter: the coldest slab, all ice and pond and guests
Spring / Conclusion: thaw and sunrise, the whole book closing

One warning: the commonest trap is taking Thoreau for a hermit with no use for people. His cabin stood within easy reach of the village and the railway; he went back to town, had guests, made trips. What he wanted was not to escape people but to press the non-negotiable chores of life down to the minimum.

3. Passages and Marginalia

On “why go”: one sentence that fixes the stance of the whole experiment

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

— Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

This is the book’s marching order, and the whole weight sits on deliberately. The word is not “withdrawn”, and not “leisurely”; it comes closer to “on purpose, without settling”. Thoreau is not arguing for quiet. He is arguing something harder: how I spend this day is mine to decide, not something my neighbours decide for me.

My note: read on from that sentence and the book keeps doing the same thing over and over — splitting “this is how one should live” into “what I actually did today”. He writes how many hours a book costs, what a pound of beans sells for, how many lengths of cord it takes to sound the pond. The abstractions all get cashed out into countable things.

On “simplicity”: cut the day down to what is necessary

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

— Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

Three “simplicity”s are not rhetorical repetition; they are an escalation in number. Once is not enough, so he says it three times — closer to a slogan he chants at himself than a maxim written for a reader.

This passage is often clipped into a single line about “returning to nature”. Its neighbours are sharper: Thoreau treats a house as a place to pass through, not a load to carry for life. Simplicity here is not an aesthetic. It is a subtraction problem — every acquisition starts with a question about whether it makes you freer, not whether it makes you look better.

On “cost”: one sentence that redefines “expensive”

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

— Economy

着重点This flips the arithmetic of “is it worth it”: forget the price tag, ask which slice of your life you are trading away for it. A thing bought and never used does not stop costing — you already spent the time that bought it, and it does not come back.

My note: in “Economy” Thoreau really does list his accounts — boards, planks, nails, old bricks, plaster — line by line, down to the running total and the surplus. That is not a literary flourish; it is him turning the sentence above into something you can check with a pencil.

On “desperation”: written right at the front

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

— Economy

危险Note the middle word: quiet. Not the wailing kind — the silent kind. The days go on, the job goes on, and somewhere underneath you know something was never cashed in. He does not write “suffering”; he writes “quiet”, because quiet is what escapes notice.

My note: the line sits in “Economy”, right beside the ledgers, and the placement matters. Desperation is not a lyric aside; it is the conclusion the arithmetic arrives at — people trade the most expensive part of a life for things they do not need.

On “a different drummer”: a sentence for anyone who cannot keep in step

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

— Conclusion

The line comes at the very end, in “Conclusion”, only after the whole experiment has been reported. So it is not consolation; it is the finding. Falling out of step may not be falling behind — it may just be that each person has his own tempo.

My note: only here did the opening question — why go to the pond — get its answer. Going to the pond was how he found out what his own beat actually sounded like, rather than walking to someone else’s.

One trap in translations — worth saying up front

Walden has many Chinese versions, and they differ more than one expects. Some render deliberately as “calmly”, others as “on purpose”, and the taste is not the same. Some cut the account-keeping down hard, so that “Economy” reads like lyrical prose and the sentence about life being the cost of a thing loses its floor. If you only read a translation, keep an English copy beside it and at least see the pressure of these lines. Punctuation also varies slightly between editions, so cite the chapter when you quote².

4. Lessons and Practice

Convert price into life-cost. Before buying anything, do the sum: how many hours of work does this cost, and would I trade those hours for it? I wrote the conversion on a note and kept it in my wallet; impulse buys dropped off.
Give every object a turn on stage. Thoreau’s simplicity is not indiscriminate discarding; it keeps only what is necessary. My rough rule: an object unused for three months goes into a “pending” box, and if it is still untouched three months after that, it leaves. The space it frees up feels better than the thing did.
Practise observation through one fixed window. The precise soundings in “The Ponds” and “The Pond in Winter” look dull but are hard skill. I now stand at the same window for ten minutes a day and do one thing: describe how today differs from yesterday. After a few days the eye sharpens.

5. Closing

When I finished, I deleted a bookmark I had kept for years — the one about “dwelling poetically”. What Thoreau actually taught me was plainer: work out your own drumbeat first, then decide how to spend today. He was no hermit either; he was a man who turned his life into an experiment and was willing to hand over the books.

Next: A New Account of Tales of the World (Shishuo Xinyu). A small book of people’s words and deeds, exactly the reverse of Walden — Thoreau wrote how one man should live; it records how a crowd actually talks.

Footnotes

Thoreau states his situation in the very first paragraph: “I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months.” One sentence carries solitude, a self-built house and self-support all at once. ↩
There is a further layer to the translations: they handle a phrase like “the essential facts of life” very differently, some landing on the plain “the basic facts of life”, others expanding it into “the most essential things in life”. The expanded version reads smoothly, but it sands off Thoreau’s dry, almost engineering-drawing plainness. Only against the original do you see that he refuses to be lyrical on purpose. ↩

Reading The Brothers Karamazov: A Parricide in Which No One Is a Bystander

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 13:30:00 GMT

1. Why I Read It

The last book, On Liberty, ended on a line: no one may govern you unless you harm another. Closing it, I got stuck — and then, may you govern yourself? So I turned to Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov is a parricide, and he pushes the question of who can stand outside it all the way down.

I had expected a detective novel, and found that the case is not about who did it but about who had a part in it. Three brothers, a father, a bastard son, and a houseful of talkers — every one of them tied to the death by some thread.

What stopped me was a line from the Elder Zosima. He does not console the woman who comes to him; he tells her a truth close to cruelty: love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. The book’s question starts here — if love, freedom and faith are all this hard, how is a person to live at all?

2. The Skeleton First

The Brothers Karamazov was serialised in The Russian Messenger in 1879-1880 and then published as a book; it is Dostoevsky’s last novel. Four parts, twelve books, and an epilogue. It was planned as only the first part of a larger work — the second was never written, the author dying the following year. It is a murder between father and sons, and it reads as a book about freedom, faith and responsibility.

Before beginning I laid out the four parts, so the cast would not swamp me:

Part	Books	Content	How I read it
One	I to III	Family history, a gathering, the sensualists	Get to know the family first
Two	IV to VI	Conflict, Ivan’s “Rebellion”, Zosima	The book’s intellectual core is in V and VI
Three	VII to IX	The elder’s death, Mitya’s fall, the investigation	Ideas drop back into action and desire
Four	X to XII	Boys, Ivan’s collapse, the court	“Who is guilty” is handed to a trial
Epilogue	—	Alyosha at the great stone	The close, and the book’s true register

Expand: one line per book (standard titles)

Book I, The History of a Family: first, how this family came apart
Book II, An Unfortunate Gathering: the awkward dinner at the monastery, where every conflict is planted
Book III, The Sensualists: Dmitri’s confession; the soliloquy on beauty is here
Book IV, Lacerations: people wounding one another; hardly a clean conversation in it
Book V, Pro and Contra: Ivan’s “Rebellion” and The Grand Inquisitor — the heart of the book
Book VI, The Russian Monk: Zosima’s life and teaching, set face to face with Book V
Book VII, Alyosha: the protagonist finally moves; the most “action” the book has
Book VIII, Mitya: Dmitri’s descent and frenzy — the fastest-written book of them all
Book IX, The Preliminary Investigation: the case laid out, evidence and motive at war
Book X, Boys: a side-track that looks idle, and is really paving the way to the epilogue
Book XI, Ivan Fyodorovich: Ivan’s three meetings with Smerdyakov, the coldest scenes in the novel
Book XII, A Judicial Error: the court convicts a man of murder, and convicts the wrong one
Epilogue: Alyosha speaks to the children at the stone; the last words are “Hurrah for Karamazov”

One caution: do not rush to take sides. The most persuasive speeches in this novel often come from the least trustworthy people. Dostoevsky’s method is not to make you agree with anyone; it is to make you recognise a little of yourself in each of them.

3. Passages and Marginalia

On beauty: the battlefield inside one man

The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.

— The Brothers Karamazov, Bk III, ch. 3 (trans. Garnett)

Dmitri says this while confessing that he is pulled by the noble and the base at once. Dostoevsky does not write “evil” as somebody else’s property; he puts it back inside the person.

My note: the passage is often lifted out as “Dostoevsky on beauty”, when its setting is filthy — the man saying it is sunk in lust and shame. Cut the setting away and the sentence goes weightless.

On love: a consolation that refuses to console

I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.

— The Brothers Karamazov, Bk II, ch. 4 (trans. Garnett)

着重点The woman who comes for help wants reassurance; Zosima hands her a warning. He splits love in two: the dream kind is self-importance on a stage, the active kind is the daily grind of trying.

My note: the line almost forecasts the ending. What Alyosha does later is small things, one by one — sitting with children, remembering names, keeping his word. He does not shout about love; he simply lets it land on the ground.

On faith: a man returning his ticket

And therefore I hasten to return my ticket. [...] It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket.

— The Brothers Karamazov, Bk V, ch. 4, “Rebellion” (trans. Garnett)

危险Ivan is no atheist; what he protests is “that world” itself. He tells of a child tormented to death, and then says the entrance price is too high, he cannot pay it, he hands the ticket back.

My note: the force of the line lies precisely in that it does not attack God, only refuses the cost. Ivan does not want a rebuttal; he wants the suffering handed back to whoever permits it. Alyosha says only, “That is rebellion,” and lowers his eyes.

On freedom: a monologue about “miracle, mystery and authority”

We have corrected Thy work and have founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority.

— The Brothers Karamazov, Bk V, ch. 5, The Grand Inquisitor (trans. Garnett)

The Inquisitor’s three words are a list of governing tools “Miracle” replaces free choice, “mystery” replaces questioning, “authority” replaces judgement. His argument is that men cannot carry freedom, so the gift you gave was too heavy; we take it back and substitute something easier to manage. Ivan writes the poem not to let the Inquisitor win, but to lay that rebuttal on the table.

My note: this passage is the heart of the book because it writes freedom as a burden rather than a prize. It joins straight onto On Liberty: Mill says others must not govern you; Ivan says men may not dare to take up an ungoverned freedom at all.

On the ending: the shout by the great stone

“Hurrah for Karamazov!”

— The Brothers Karamazov, epilogue, the last words of the book (trans. Garnett)

笔记To give the book’s final sentence to a group of children is a heavy choice. After so much squalor, it closes on a company agreeing to “remember this moment”.

My note: what Alyosha gives them is not doctrine but a very concrete proposal — whatever they later become, they must remember this moment they once spent together. The novel starts from a murder and ends on a shared memory, and that is roughly Dostoevsky’s answer: salvation is not elsewhere, it is in the little that people manage to keep between them.

A trap of quotations, and a trap of translations First the quotation. One line travels everywhere — “If God does not exist, everything is permitted” — and is usually credited to Dostoevsky. Strictly, it is not a single line in the novel; it is a paraphrase distilled from what Ivan says and what Smerdyakov repeats. Quote it as “the sense of it”, not as the text. Then the translations. The common Chinese versions are mainly Geng Jizhi’s and Rong Rude’s, and they differ considerably in wording; among English versions Garnett’s is the most widely read, though it is early-twentieth-century English with an old-fashioned sentence. The repetitions and prolixity of the Russian are a deliberate voice, and every translation makes choices for the reader. Best to hold to one version start to finish and not hop between them — voice is the life of this novel.

4. What I Put to Use

Sort the names before you read. Dmitri is Mitya, Alexei is Alyosha, Ivan is Vanya, and the fourth son, Smerdyakov, lives in another position entirely. With the names straight, the long “who is arguing with whom” conversations become readable.
Read Books V and VI together. Ivan’s “Rebellion” and Zosima’s teaching stand face to face; read one alone and you will think the author takes a side. Hear both and you see his method is to leave the question open.
Keep watching who feels he had a share. The real movement of the novel is not in the case but in what each person admits: whoever first owns his connection to the death is the one who begins to change.

5. Closing

Finishing The Brothers Karamazov, I found my idea of freedom split in two. The last book drew the outer boundary; this one describes the inner struggle — one says no one may govern you, the other says you may not be able to govern yourself. Put together, the conclusion is not comfortable: freedom is both a right against interference and a weight a person must carry alone.

Next: Walden. From the loudest crowd to the quietest pond — I want to see what the same freedom becomes when it is set down beside a man alone.

Reading On Liberty: When Does Your Own Business Become Someone Else’s

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 12:30:00 GMT

1. Why I Read It

In the spring of 2025 I kept running into the same question in arguments online: over a private matter that harms no one, does anyone else have the standing to interfere? Some people reached for “public order and good morals”; others replied, “none of your business”. By the end nobody could say where the line of “none of your business” actually ran.

So I went back to Mill’s On Liberty. What drew me in first was not the content but an old Chinese title — Yan Fu had rendered it as Qunji Quanjie Lun, “On the Boundary of Rights between the Group and the Self”. The boundary between “group” and “self” is exactly the line I could not argue straight.

The book is only five chapters and more than a century old, yet it reads as if it were speaking straight into today’s arguments. Mill really answers one question: under what circumstances may society legitimately interfere with a person’s conduct? His answer is startlingly short — only when that conduct harms others.

2. The Skeleton First

On Liberty was published in 1859, the same year as Darwin’s Origin of Species. Five chapters. Mill worked it out with his wife, Harriet Taylor, who died a year before it went to press; the dedication at the front is written to her. At its centre is a single “harm principle”: the only purpose for which power may be rightfully exercised over a member of a community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

The five chapters can be taken in at a glance:

Chapter	Title	What it settles
I	Introductory	Lays down the harm principle as the master rule
II	Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion	Whether fear of harm is grounds for silencing anyone
III	Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being	Why a person should live as himself, not as someone else
IV	Of the Limits to the Authority of Society over the Individual	Draws “harm” down into everyday conduct
V	Applications	Takes it to particular cases, and closes the book

Expand: the three fields the harm principle marks out (my own annotations)

The self-regarding part: a person’s own thought, tastes and way of life — society has no authority over it
The other-regarding part: once another’s interests are damaged, society gains jurisdiction
The middle ground: Mill admits it is hard to draw, but insists on the line first, the rules second
What he keeps stressing: not “how grave is the harm”, but “has anyone actually been harmed”
The easily missed layer: Mill also says a person can harm others by inaction

One caution: “harm no one” does not mean “never make anyone uncomfortable”. Mill’s harm is damage to particular interests, to those interests that ought to count as rights — not offence, distaste, or “I just don’t like it”. Let “I don’t like it” count as harm and the whole principle runs backwards.

3. Passages and Marginalia

On the definition of freedom: one line that closes the door

The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.

— On Liberty, ch. I

Mill gives “freedom” no romantic definition; he gives it a boundary. The first half is a right, the second half a condition, and only the two locked together are what he means by freedom.

My note: the line wears well because it makes freedom something you can execute: not “you may have whatever you want”, but “can your way and another’s way coexist”. Every claim to unlimited freedom has dropped the second half.

On the harm principle: the master key of the book

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. [...] His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

— On Liberty, ch. I

Why “it’s for your own good” is not a reason The blade of this sentence is all in the last half. Most paternal interference flies the flag of “your own good”, and Mill nails the road shut: a benefit cannot serve as a warrant. To govern another, first show that he has harmed another.

危险Keeping “you shouldn’t do that” apart from “you may do that” is the whole strength of the book.

On speech: a hypothesis too extreme to leave room for exceptions

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

— On Liberty, ch. II

The hypothesis is absurdly impossible, and Mill uses it precisely to shut every exception. If your reason is “everyone says so”, this sentence still applies.

My note: Mill adds two more practical arguments — the suppressed opinion may be true; and even if it is false, only testing it in argument lets the correct side actually understand itself. He turns free speech from a right into an instrument for keeping truth awake.

On individuality: why a person should live as himself

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.

— On Liberty, ch. III

着重点“The ape-like one of imitation” is no gentle comparison. What Mill is saying is not the platitude “have a mind of your own”, but: choose for yourself and you bring observation, reasoning and judgment into play; let others choose and those faculties never grow.

My note: Chapter III is often read as a matter of “character”, when it is really a matter of capacity. For Mill, individuality is not decoration; it is the condition under which a person’s faculties get exercised at all. Without it, people become easier to govern — and weaker.

On the state: why the last line is not about institutions

The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.

— On Liberty, ch. V

笔记The book is about individual freedom, and it ends on the state. Mill’s point runs backwards: how far a country can get depends on what it does not crush its individuals into.

My note: he goes on to say that a state which dwarfs its people to make them docile will find that “with small men no great thing can really be accomplished”. The line joins “freedom” to “national power” — he is not merely speaking up for the individual, he is doing the sums.

The trap of reading the translation against the original There is one ditch in Chinese renderings of this book: the word harm. Mill’s harm means damage to particular interests — even to those interests “which ought to be considered as rights” — narrower than the everyday “discomfort” and heavier than mere offence. Chinese versions waver between “伤害” and “危害”, and the moment harm is widened into “offence”, the whole principle is emptied out. Yan Fu’s old rendering, Qunji Quanjie Lun, is a classical-Chinese paraphrase: he rendered liberty as “自繇”, elegant and opinionated, excellent for feeling how the concept was first received, misleading as a precise text. What I ended up doing was read a modern Chinese version for the gist, then go back to the English and check chapter I sentence by sentence.

4. What I Put to Use

Ask “who was harmed” before “who is right”. In an argument, split it in two: has anyone’s concrete interest been touched? If not, leave each side its freedom and stop demanding agreement. This alone removes most pointless heat.
Fit a separate gate to “it’s for your own good”. Whether you are governing or being governed, check what the reason really is: has the other person been damaged, or is it only that “I think he ought to be that way”?
Treat individuality as a trainable capacity. Mill says imitation needs one faculty, choosing needs the whole set. In daily life that means deliberately making the small decisions only you can make for yourself — what to read, how to spend a day — so the faculties do not fall idle.

5. Closing

Finishing On Liberty, I filed it as a “statement of boundary”: it does not tell you how to live, only where the line lies at which others may reach in. Mill’s answer is hard, and for that very reason it works — vague goodwill convinces no one.

Next: The Brothers Karamazov. One book asks whether others may govern you; the other asks whether a person can govern himself. Moving from political writing to a novel, I want to see what the other half of freedom looks like.

Reading the Wenxin Diaolong: The Work of Writing Happens Before the Pen Moves

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 13:10:00 GMT

1. Why I Read It

At the start of spring 2025 I was stuck on an essay I could not finish: material piled up, the sentences smooth, and yet the moment it reached paper it fell apart. A friend said the problem was one of conception, and handed me the Wenxin Diaolong. I had assumed it was an old book of rhetorical tricks; opening it, I found that Liu Xie had set “before you lift the pen” apart as its own chapter, called Shensi.

The Wenxin Diaolong was completed near the end of the Southern Qi. Its author, Liu Xie, spent his youth lodged in a Buddhist monastery and only later took office. Fifty chapters, all of them about “the effort of the mind in writing” — not how to write beautifully, but what actually happens inside you before a piece of writing takes shape.

What changed my view was the opening of Shensi. It offers no formula, only one condition: stillness. The idea was not unique in Southern Qi poetics, but Liu Xie put it first in the whole section on craft, which amounts to saying that the hardest step in writing is not finding words but emptying the mind.

2. The Skeleton First

Ten scrolls, fifty chapters, roughly 37,000 characters in the received text. The upper half is twenty-five chapters, from the Yuandao to the Shuji; the lower half is another twenty-five, from Shensi to the Xuzhi. It is written throughout in parallel prose, all couplets and tonal cadence — at once the finest demonstration by a man writing about writing, and the first obstacle for a reader today. It was put together near the end of the Southern Qi.

I read it in three blocks:

Section	Chapters	What it settles
The hinge of literature	The five chapters from Yuandao to Biansao	Where writing takes its root
Genres	The twenty from Mingshi to Shuji	The rules proper to each kind of text
Craft and criticism	From Shensi to Chengqi	How a piece is made, and how it is read

Expand: how the lower twenty-five chapters divide (my own annotations)

The nineteen on craft (Shensi to Zongshu): from conception, style and bone down to tonal rules, allusion and word-choice — a whole production line
Shensi: conception. The book’s hinge, about “how to think”, and placed first of all
Tixing and Fenggu: one on how a writer’s temperament fixes his style, one on giving a piece a spine
Qingcai and Rongcai: feeling against wording, and the art of cutting
Shenglv, Zhangju, Lici: polishing at the level of the sentence
The five on criticism (Shixu to Chengqi): reading a work back into its age, its nature and its author
Zhiyin: how to be a competent reader, one of the book’s closing movements
Xuzhi: the author’s own preface, a reckoning with a lifetime, and the key to the whole

One caution: the commonest mistake is to treat the book as a manual of technique. Its “writing” is far larger than what we call an essay today — scriptures and edicts, riddles and puns all count. Liu Xie wanted one order that could cover every kind of text.

3. Passages and Marginalia

On the title: one line that says what the book is for

夫“文心”者，言为文之用心也。

— Wenxin Diaolong, ch. 50, “Xuzhi”

My own working translation: “Wenxin” means the effort of the mind in writing.

Only in the last chapter of the book does it explain its own title. Liu Xie does not say this is a set of rules for composition; he says it is the effort of the mind in writing, and the whole weight falls on “mind”. This is a book about inner work.

My note: to place your most important definition at the end and leave it to the author himself is rare even now. Read the Xuzhi first and you are handed a map drawn by the author’s own hand.

On conception: what has to happen before the pen moves

是以陶钧文思，贵在虚静，疏瀹五藏，澡雪精神。

— ch. 26, “Shensi”

My own working translation: In shaping the thought of writing, what matters most is emptiness and stillness: rinse the five organs, scour the spirit clean.

“Emptiness and stillness” is not zoning out; it is clearing the site “Shaping” is the potter’s wheel; “rinsing” is washing out. Liu Xie is not describing idleness — he is having you remove the stray thoughts, the preconceptions, the deadline-panic first, and leave a patch of ground free inside. Putting this first in the section on craft is his way of announcing: if you cannot write, it is usually not your hand that is at fault.

着重点The line that follows is stranger still: “In silent concentration the thought reaches a thousand years; in a quiet change of expression the eye travels ten thousand miles.” Going still is precisely what lets you cross a thousand years. Liu Xie’s take on inspiration and today’s “input before output” shake hands across fifteen hundred years.

On true and false feeling: two roads for a writer

昔诗人什篇，为情而造文；辞人赋颂，为文而造情。

— ch. 31, “Qingcai”

My own working translation: The poets of the Book of Songs made their writing to carry feeling; the later rhapsodists manufactured feeling to fit writing already made.

This is the closest thing in the book to a verdict. In the Odes, feeling comes first and the writing follows; in the later rhapsodies the writing is set out first and a feeling is then procured to fill it.

My note: “manufacturing feeling to fit writing” predicts almost every instance today of writing in order to post. Liu Xie was not against ornament; he was against ornament turned into the goal — work made that way will not even convince its own author.

On the understanding critic: how hard it is to read well

知音其难哉！音实难知，知实难逢，逢其知音，千载其一乎！

— ch. 48, “Zhiyin”

My own working translation: How hard it is to find one who understands! The work is hard to know; the knower is hard to meet; and that the two should meet, once in a thousand years.

危险Three exclamation marks in a row — the most agitated passage in the book. The work is hard to understand, the reader hard to find, and the two colliding is a once-a-millennium event.

My note: he then offers a method, and it is not mystical — “Only after playing a thousand tunes does one understand sound; only after seeing a thousand swords does one know blades.” Judgment comes from sheer volume of exposure. The line became the plain truth of connoisseurship: taste is not born, it is fed.

On tradition and change: do not just circle in the yard

文律运周，日新其业。变则可久，通则不乏。

— ch. 29, “Tongbian”

My own working translation: The law of writing revolves; its work renews each day. To change is to endure; to carry on is never to run dry.

笔记“Carrying on” is keeping the old ground; “changing” is offering something new. Both are required. Liu Xie warns the man who guards a single style: that is circling in the courtyard, not walking ten thousand miles.

My note: this reads as if aimed straight at today. Copy the ancients phrase for phrase, or chase only the new vocabulary with no foundation at all — Liu Xie thinks neither road goes far. His answer is homely: “Look to the present to make the strange, consult the ancients to fix the law.”

The traps of editions and modern translations The difficulty of the Wenxin Diaolong comes in two layers. One is the text: the chapter “Yinxiu” survives incomplete, and the received version also carries passages supplied later by hands unknown; their authenticity has long been disputed, so keep that in mind when you reach it. The other is translation: the book is parallel prose, and its couplets and cadence are part of the meaning. A plain colloquial version reads smoothly but files away the comparison that lives inside the antithesis. My habit was to read the main text slowly against the original, look up hard places in Fan Wenlan’s Wenxin Diaolong zhu, and use Zhou Zhenfu’s modern translation as a corridor — understand first, then go back and listen to the sound.

4. What I Put to Use

Schedule the “emptiness and stillness”. Do not wait for inspiration to arrive. Before a long piece, keep ten minutes with nothing read and nothing heard, say the problem to yourself once, and only then begin. Liu Xie’s “rinse the five organs” comes down, today, to that one small act.
Split “feeling” from “writing” before you start. Ask at the top of every piece: is this “writing made to carry feeling”, or “feeling manufactured to fit the writing”? If it is the second, you are not ready to write; go and make the point clear first.
Take Zhiyin as your standard for reading drafts. “Only after a thousand tunes” is about editing as much as writing: reread your own old work and judgment slowly returns to your hands. The thing to fear in revision is not reluctance to cut; it is being unable to see what is wrong.

5. Closing

Closing the book, what stayed with me was not a technique but an order: read the mind, think it clear, then put down the pen. By placing “conception” at the front of the whole theory, Liu Xie concedes something on behalf of every writer — what costs the most was never the sentence, it was the night before the sentence.

Next: On Liberty. One book explains how a piece of writing grows; the other explains what a person may grow into. I want to see how much the thinking has to change when the subject shifts from poetics to politics.

Reading the Inferno: The Deeper You Go, the More Gifted the Sinners

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 12:50:00 GMT

1. Why I Read It

The first time I picked up the Divine Comedy was in the autumn of 2024, from a brittle, borrowed copy of Wang Weike’s Chinese prose translation. Twice I stalled in the first canto: a dark wood, three beasts, a Roman poet appearing out of nowhere, the whole thing moving like a dream while every line ended in rhyme. Flattened into prose the rhythm vanished; I shut the book and filed it under “know the gist, no need to finish”.

What pulled me back was Ulysses. Digging around, I came across Canto XXVI: Dante’s Ulysses stands in a fissure of the eighth circle and calls out to his crew that they were not made to live as brutes. The eighth circle houses the fraudulent. A man Homer wrote as a hero, given one of the poem’s most exalted speeches by Dante himself — why is he here? Not lust, not wrath, but the one kind of sin that takes a mind to commit.

That was the day I finally saw the Comedy’s real architecture: it is not cataloguing misdeeds, it is ranking evil. The deeper you go, the more intelligence the sin requires, the more deliberate and less forgivable it becomes. What won me over was not that Dante wrote a Hell; it is that he dared to grade sin.

2. The Skeleton First

The Divine Comedy divides into Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, thirty-three cantos each, plus the canto that opens the whole poem — one hundred exactly. Inferno therefore has thirty-four. It is written in a metre Dante invented: three lines to a rhyme, each tercet interlocking with the next, called terza rima. The whole journey is set around Easter of the year 1300.

The cheapest way into Inferno is to memorise, first, who lives in each of the nine circles, rather than starting with the allusions:

Level	Who is kept here	How I read it
Prologue	The dark wood and three beasts	The start is “lost”, not “wicked”
Gate and vestibule	The fence-sitters who never chose	Not taking a side is a recorded position too
Circle One, Limbo	Unbaptised sages and infants	Good people live here, not bad ones
Circles Two to Five	Lust, gluttony, avarice, wrath	The “incontinent”, driven by appetite
Circle Six	Heresy	Wrong in belief, not in act
Circle Seven	Violence, in three rings	Against others, against oneself, against God
Circle Eight	Fraud, in ten ditches	The deeper you go, the more brains the sin takes
Circle Nine	Treachery, in four zones	The bottom is reserved for betraying trust
The centre	Three-faced Lucifer	Three mouths, one sinner each

Expand: how the nine circles divide (my own annotations)

Circle Two, lust: Minos sits at the entrance, wrapping his tail to fix how many levels down a soul must fall
Circle Three, gluttony: Cerberus guards the gate; the greedy lie in mud and rain
Circle Four, avarice: hoarders and spenders shove weights into each other
Circle Five, wrath: sunk in the marsh of Styx, the angry brawling on the surface, the sullen below
Circle Six, heresy: in burning tombs, Farinata stands half-erect in his coffin, unbowed
Circle Seven, violence: ring one against others, ring two against oneself (suicides become trees), ring three against God
Circle Eight, fraud: ten ditches, from flatterers to counterfeiters, with Ulysses in the eighth
Circle Nine, treachery: the frozen lake Cocytus, its four zones named for Cain, Antenor, Ptolemy, Judas
The centre: Lucifer with three faces and three mouths, chewing Judas, Brutus and Cassius

One caution: do not take “deeper is worse” as a moralist’s slogan. Dante has his own logic — incontinence (no self-control) is light, fraud (deliberately using other people) is heavy. He is not asking what frightens you; he is asking what you chose.

3. Passages and Marginalia

On the starting point: the first line of middle age

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.

— Inferno I, lines 1-3

My own working translation: Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.

This is the poem’s doorway, and its most honest line. It gives no name and no identity, only a state: lost. Dante sets an equals sign between “the middle of life” and “gone astray”.

My note: the poem opens with no god and no judgement, just a man standing still and admitting he has lost the road. Lower the posture first, and the descent that follows can stand.

On the gate: a door that only states consequences

Per me si va ne la città dolente, per me si va ne l'etterno dolore, per me si va tra la perduta gente.

— Inferno III, lines 1-3

My own working translation: Through me you pass into the city of woe, through me you pass into eternal pain, through me you pass among the lost people.

Read the inscription backwards and it makes sense Its final line is “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” — abandon every hope, you who enter. It is usually quoted like a horror-film tagline, but it is really a definition: what makes Hell Hell is not the pain, it is that afterwards no other possibility is left.

危险One door apart divides not comfort from suffering, but removes “hope” as a variable. Nine words that define Hell outdo every torture scene that follows.

On desire: how “love” lands people in Hell

Amor, ch'a nullo amato amar perdona,

— Inferno V, line 103

My own working translation: Love, which permits no one who is loved to return no love.

着重点Francesca and Paolo were reading a book when they fell for each other, and that day they read no further. Dante makes “the book” and “the desire” two sides of a single thing: what condemns them is not appetite alone, but appetite taught by a story.

My note: the strongest stroke in Canto V is that Dante the narrator faints after hearing Francesca. The only thing in Hell that costs the narrator his composure is not torture; it is a well-told love story. His point: if even he is carried off by such telling, what of anyone else?

On guilt: a hero filed under fraud

fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.

— Inferno XXVI, lines 119-120

My own working translation: You were not made to live as brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.

This line is quoted so often that the context has been almost quoted away. Dante puts the finest piece of humanity in Ulysses’ mouth, then locks him in the eighth circle.

My note: Ulysses uses the name of “virtue and knowledge” to urge his crew past the edge of the known world, and the ship goes down with all hands. Dante’s verdict is plain — idealism is no immunity, and deceiving people with a noble reason is still fraud. It also explains why, for Dante, the clever sin sits nearer the bottom than the muddled one.

On the exit: after one night, the stars

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

— Inferno XXXIV, line 139

My own working translation: And thence we came forth, to see again the stars.

笔记This is the last line of Inferno. All three parts — Hell, Purgatory, Paradise — close on “the stars”, a ring Dante left himself. Climbing from the bottom of Hell up to the sea of the other hemisphere, it is dawn: he puts the book’s darkest place right beside a sunrise.

The trap of a single translation Chinese renderings of the Comedy fall into roughly two lines: prose (Wang Weike, Tian Dewang), easy to read, good for getting the plot straight; and verse (Huang Guobin), which keeps the sound of terza rima but twists the syntax. I began with Wang Weike alone: smooth, but it never felt like a poem. Only when I set a prose version against a verse one, plot against sound, did I hear why the poem is built in threes and not fours. Keep at least two translations on the desk; never just one.

4. What I Put to Use

Read the map before the text. Learn who lives in each circle first; when a stranger appears, ask which circle he is in and whether his sin is incontinence or fraud. The position is itself the commentary.
Read a long poem aloud. The Comedy is written for the ear; terza rima is almost inaudible when you read silently. Even without Italian, the joints surface if you read the marked rhymes aloud in your own language, and the sentence breaks come with them.
Use Limbo as a mirror. Circle One holds unbaptised sages — good men who nonetheless have no place in Heaven. That is the most modern circle of all: many people are not villains, they simply lack the condition for entry. Telling “evil” apart from “arrived too late” is what keeps the book from turning you into a moral judge.

5. Closing

Finishing Inferno changed an old picture for me: Hell is not there to frighten you, it is there to sort you. Dante spends thirty-four cantos arranging every human wrong into a staircase from light to heavy, and deliberately leaves the deepest steps for the cleverest, best-argued men. That unsettles more than any threat.

Next: the Wenxin Diaolong. Both books are about “writing” — one uses poetry to trace where the heart falls, the other uses parallel prose to explain how a piece of writing grows. I want to see how far those two minds are apart.

Reading Anna Karenina: Two Plots, One Question

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 13:40:00 GMT

1. Why Read It

I began it because the opening line is quoted so much. I wanted to know what actually follows a sentence everyone can recite.

It was a summer, and I read it as a physical book, slowly. The first few dozen pages tripped me up: I would be moving along Anna’s line, then veer off into the countryside, into a man named Levin arguing about farming and worrying over the harvest. At one point I wanted to skip those chapters and keep only Anna’s.

What changed my mind was realising, somewhere in the middle, a simple fact: nearly half of this book contains almost no Anna. Tolstoy is not wandering; he does it on purpose — he sets two plots side by side so each explains the other. From that moment I was finally reading the novel.

2. The Skeleton First

Anna Karenina was begun in 1873 and serialised in The Russian Messenger from 1875 to 1877, in eight parts. It carries two nearly equal main lines: Anna and Vronsky on one, Levin and Kitty on the other. The two sets meet only rarely and otherwise live their separate lives. By report, late in the serialisation the editor disliked the content of the final part, and publishing its ending caused friction with the magazine — a detail often used as a footnote to the book itself¹. The eight-part division and the chapter counts vary a little from one edition to the next.

For a book this thick I keep three maps, so that I don’t lock onto a single line:

Approach	What it tracks	What it solves
By storyline	The turning points of each plot	Which chapter belongs to whose story
By character	Who is watching, who is watched	How opinion pushes the plot along
By scene	Ball, race, station, mowing	Anchoring the themes in concrete scenes

Expand: where the weight of the eight parts falls (my own annotations)

Part 1: both lines start at once — Anna goes to reconcile her brother, Levin comes to town to propose
Part 2: the ball and the race; the first crack appears in Anna’s position
Part 3: Levin works the fields; Anna is caught between two homes
Part 4: each line driven to a crisis — one wants to leave, one wants to marry
Part 5: Anna’s marriage breaks; Levin’s family is just beginning
Part 6: country life; the fatigue between Anna and Vronsky surfaces
Part 7: Anna’s collapse; the darkest part of the book
Part 8: Levin’s problem of faith, and whether he will go as a volunteer

One caution: the book is most easily read as one of two stories — the fate of a “bad woman”, or a love ground down by society. Both thin it out. What it really watches is how a person lives in other people’s eyes and how a person lives inside their own mind, and Tolstoy gives each of those its own line.

3. Passages and Marginalia

On “family”: a line quoted until worn smooth

My own working translation: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

— Anna Karenina, Part 1, opening

This is usually taken for a sigh about happiness, but it is really about the shape of the thing called a family: it succeeds in only one form, and fails in as many ways as there are families.

My note: copy it onto a quote card and you waste it. It is closer to a definition the author lays down for the whole book — what he writes next is precisely one of those “unhappy in its own way” cases. Set a general rule at the start, then fill it with an entire novel: that is Tolstoy’s usual move².

On “being seen”: the plot is pushed by other people’s eyes

My own working translation: She sits in company and those around her quietly step half a pace away; no one says anything, and yet she knows she has been set apart. What hurts is not being accused but being seen.

— from the drift of Anna’s position, Parts 5 and 7

危险Almost every turn on Anna’s line is taken by other people’s eyes, not by her own feet. The book rarely contains an explicit verdict, and yet the punishment is carried out by “not looking at her”.

My note: Tolstoy writes society the way he writes weather — no comment, only temperature and wind. Reading on, I saw that Anna’s true opponent is not any single person but the combined gaze of everyone.

On “labour”: the brightest passage on Levin’s line

My own working translation: He mows alongside the peasants, from early morning until the sun leans west. At the point of exhaustion his mind empties instead, leaving only the rise and fall of his arms; that happiness of thinking nothing at all he would not find again in many places afterwards.

— from the drift of Levin’s mowing, Part 3

On Levin’s line the subject is not really love; it is how to keep living a day at a time.

My note: on a first reading I took these chapters for interludes and skipped them without regret; on a second I saw they are the other face of the same coin as Anna’s line. One person presses himself down into the ground through work, the other suspends herself in the air through love — and the difference in how each ends is already buried here.

Read the two lines side by side

The most important decision in reading Anna Karenina is not to skip Levin’s chapters. Set the two lines side by side and you find Tolstoy asking one question — how should a person live — with two answers: one going into society, one going into the land. Read only one line and the question is only half there.

On “living”: the answer Levin finds at the end

My own working translation: He searches and turns it over and finds no account that can convince his reason; in the end he admits that reason will not give him an answer. The one thing he can hold is this: to live by an unseen rule inside him, and to be a little better to each person around him, nothing more.

— from the drift of Levin’s ending, Part 8

着重点The Anna plot asks whether life has any meaning, and the Levin plot gives an answer that is barely an answer at all. Tolstoy’s skill lies exactly there: he offers no handsome conclusion, only something a man has just managed to hold.

My note: this ending leaves many readers unsatisfied — too soft, too ordinary. But like the opening line, it is the author closing the book’s seams: happiness has no drama, unhappiness does. What Levin finds is not a truth but a posture that lets him keep living.

Don’t read it as a moral tale

The laziest reading passes judgement for the book: Anna was wrong, so she came to that end; or Anna was innocent and society destroyed her. Tolstoy himself does not do this — he gives Anna no verdict, and writes her to the last with a measure of tenderness. Read as a tale of reward and punishment, the passages of real craft get lost: what he writes is how each person struggles inside their own situation, not who deserves to be punished.

4. What I Actually Use

Read the two lines side by side; skip not one of Levin’s chapters. Skip them and the remaining half looks like nothing but an affair; restore the other half and it turns back into a book about how to live.
On Anna’s line, watch who is looking at her. Nearly every shift in her position happens first in other people’s eyes and only then lands on her. Watching those gazes is more useful than watching the plot.
Read the ending twice. The first time you will find it soft; the second time you see that what Levin holds, small as it is, is the only thing in the book that stands — and Tolstoy would rather give that than a handsome summary.

5. Closing

Anna Karenina made me put one habit away: that a novel has to take sides. Tolstoy sets two utterly different roads beside each other, walks them both to the end, and then tells the reader, in a nearly plain way, that what lets a person keep going is usually nothing very grand.

Next: the Divine Comedy — Dante arranges an entire universe into a building with levels, and where a person goes has been drawn up in advance. I want to see how it reads when meaning is not sought but assigned.

Footnotes

On the book’s making: begun in 1873, serialised in The Russian Messenger from 1875 to 1877, and divided into eight parts. Late in the serialisation the editor disliked the content of the final part, and publishing its ending caused friction with the magazine. The exact count of parts and chapters differs slightly across editions. ↩
On the quotations: the original is Russian, so every passage here marked My own working translation is my rendering, written after comparing several translations; it is not the original text. The opening line is best known in Chinese as 幸福的家庭都是相似的，不幸的家庭各有各的不幸, and the same sense is worded differently, with slightly different tone, in each English version. ↩

Reading Mencius: He Never Answers Directly — He Makes You Say It Yourself

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 12:30:00 GMT

1. Why Read It

My reason for picking up Mencius was practical. Quoting the Analects in my writing always felt steady and flat; swapping in a single line of Mencius could hold up a whole paragraph. I wanted to know where that push came from, so I started from the beginning.

Halfway through the first pass, I wanted to stop. It is far longer than the Analects, its passages unfold whole, and just as two people are in question and answer, it suddenly veers off into history. What turned it around for me was noticing that almost every line of Mencius lives inside a conversation. He is rarely stating; he is mostly answering.

Reading further, I realised he almost never answers directly. A question is thrown at him, he takes it, and then he sets a question of his own, leading the other person step by step to a position they will admit to. One afternoon I wrote nothing in the margins but one thing: “who is this line spoken to”. After a few pages, tone, heat, and measure all came clear.

2. The Skeleton First

Mencius has seven books — King Hui of Liang, Gongsun Chou, Duke Wen of Teng, Li Lou, Wan Zhang, Gaozi, and Jin Xin — each in two parts, fourteen sections by the old count, some thirty-five thousand characters. Tradition holds that Mencius compiled it with his disciples Wan Zhang, Gongsun Chou and others; Zhu Xi of the Southern Song placed it alongside the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean and the Analects as the “Four Books”, and after that nearly every student had to pass through it¹. Compared with the Analects, its passages read more like complete speeches: a scene, an opponent, an exchange back and forth.

So I carry no “book of quotations”, only three maps:

Approach	What it tracks	What it solves
By opponent	Whom he is speaking to	How much force a line carries
By analogy	His habit of arguing through beasts, water, farming	Why he circles before making the point
By position	Benevolent rule, the goodness of human nature, righteousness against profit	Threading his claims onto one line

Expand: how the seven books divide the work (my own annotations)

King Hui of Liang: speaking to rulers, the densest political argument
Gongsun Chou: on qi, on the mind, on the unshaken heart — the most philosophical
Duke Wen of Teng: institutions, the well-field system, funerals — the most like governance
Li Lou: short pieces, aphorisms clustered here
Wan Zhang: historical figures and when to serve or withdraw, the most like character criticism
Gaozi: on human nature, the loudest argument in the book
Jin Xin: words of late life — heaven, fate, the mind — the quietest close

One caution: the commonest mistake is to pull Mencius’s famous lines out of their dialogue and keep them on their own. Those lines are half a move inside an argument; lift one out and the game is gone, leaving only a handsome sentence.

3. Passages and Marginalia

On “arguing”: he says he has no choice

予岂好辩哉？予不得已也。

— Mencius, Duke Wen of Teng, Part 2

My own working translation: Do I love to argue? I argue because I have no choice.

These few words are the book’s self-portrait: he knows he looks like a man who quarrels, and he offers a defence for it. His disciple’s words were “outsiders say you love to argue”; he does not deny the impression, only supplies a reason — the world swings between order and chaos, false teachings rise together, and if he does not stand up and put things plainly, no one will.

My note: I first read Mencius as a hot-tempered man. Only at this line did I see that even the reputation for loving argument had been weighed — he knew how he would look, and spoke up only when there was no way not to. A man who truly loves quarrelling does not write himself a paragraph like this.

On “cannot” and “won’t”

挟太山以超北海，语人曰「我不能」，是诚不能也；为长者折枝，语人曰「我不能」，是不为也，非不能也。

— Mencius, King Hui of Liang, Part 1

My own working translation: To tuck Mount Tai under your arm and leap over the North Sea, and tell people “I cannot” — that is truly not being able. To bend for an elder’s sake, and tell people “I cannot” — that is not doing it, not inability².

笔记This line splits the greatest everyday consolation into two halves: what you truly cannot do, and what you pretend you cannot do. He says it to King Xuan of Qi: if the king says he cannot “bring kingship to the world”, that is not the Mount Tai kind of thing, it is the bending-for-an-elder kind.

My note: I aimed this at myself for a week. Most of what I had been putting off fell apart under the question — it was not “cannot”, it was “won’t”. This sentence gives no comfort, only a mirror, and the mirror usually shows something not pretty.

On “analogy”: fifty steps laughing at a hundred

王好战，请以战喻。填然鼓之，兵刃既接，弃甲曳兵而走，或百步而后止，或五十步而后止。以五十步笑百步，则何如？

— Mencius, King Hui of Liang, Part 1

My own working translation: You love war, so let me use war for the comparison. The drums roll, the blades cross, armour is thrown off and weapons dragged as men run; some stop after a hundred paces, some after fifty. If one who ran fifty paces laughed at one who ran a hundred, what would you say?

The sharpness is here: he does not tell King Hui that his rule is bad, he makes the king say “bad” himself. The king answers, “That would not do — it was only not a hundred paces; still he ran”. Mencius replies: if the king understands this, he should stop expecting his own people to outnumber his neighbours.

My note: this is the point in my subtitle. Mencius hardly pours in argument; he builds a scene you cannot refute and lets your answer come out of your own mouth. More than “you ought to”, he trusts “you tell me”.

Ask first: “who is he arguing with”

The most useful single act when reading Mencius is to write at the edge of each passage: whom is this said to. The same line, said to King Hui and said to a disciple, carries nothing alike. Find the opponent and the tone and purpose both rise to the surface.

On “qi”: where an argument’s backbone comes from

我善养吾浩然之气。……其为气也，至大至刚，以直养而无害，则塞于天地之间。

— Mencius, Gongsun Chou, Part 1

My own working translation: I am good at nourishing my vast moral qi. This qi is supremely great and supremely firm; nourished in uprightness and left unharmed, it fills the space between heaven and earth.

富贵不能淫，贫贱不能移，威武不能屈，此之谓大丈夫。

— Mencius, Duke Wen of Teng, Part 2

My own working translation: Riches and honours cannot corrupt him, poverty and low station cannot shift him, power and force cannot bend him — that is what is called a great man.

着重点The earlier passages all teach how to argue; these two turn back to ask where an argument’s backbone comes from: not technique, but a qi a man has nourished himself. The three conditions of the “great man” are all negative — they say what he will not do, not what he will achieve.

My note: only here did Mencius take hold with me. A man who can only corner others with analogies is a debater; a man who still spends effort saying how that qi is to be nourished is closer to a teacher. What he calls nourishing “in uprightness” cannot be assembled on the spot; it can only be lived honestly day by day.

A line usually read too large

“The people are the most important; the state is next; the ruler is the least” (Jin Xin, Part 2) travels widely and is often taken for an ancient declaration of democracy. In the original it concerns the order of weight among sacrifices and political power: in Mencius’s frame the people matter most because a state must be founded on people. To read it directly as “popular sovereignty” in the modern sense is to add a layer the sentence does not carry. With lines quoted this often, go back to the question they were meant to answer.

4. What I Actually Use

Before reading, write down “who is he arguing with”. A line whose listener you don’t know is a line not yet read. Once the opponent is written out, you find many passages are answering one particular person, not stating an abstract principle.
When you meet a famous line, read three sentences back. Restore the context and many “quotable lines” turn back into “one move”. That move, inside the game, usually weighs more than it did when lifted out.
Learn his method, not only his conclusion. The move that splits “cannot” from “won’t” can be aimed straight at yourself: with something you keep putting off, first ask whether it is true inability or unwillingness.

5. Closing

What Mencius taught me comes down to a kind of courtesy in argument: let the other person finish, then hand his own words gently back to him. He is not without anger — the seven books are full of his heat. Yet before those kings who would not listen, he still carried every point to the end, sentence by sentence. That unwillingness to take the shortcut is more memorable than any of his famous lines.

Next: Anna Karenina. Mencius persuades one person at a time; Tolstoy has to mind dozens at once. I want to see how a novel finishes the sentence when the argument steps off the stage and only life is left.

Footnotes

On the book’s making: seven books in two parts each, fourteen sections, some thirty-five thousand characters. Unlike the Analects, tradition holds it was compiled by Mencius together with disciples such as Wan Zhang and Gongsun Chou; how much is in his own hand is still debated. ↩
Two readings of 折枝: one takes it as breaking off a twig, an utterly easy thing; the other takes 枝 as 肢, massaging an elder’s limbs. Either way the point stands on “something effortless”, which is what makes the difference between “won’t” and “cannot” hold. ↩