People-these weird creatures-are very vainglorious. As soon as you give them a little appreciation, or even just forgiveness, they swell with pride. They boast everywhere, giddy all the time, never sure where they are or where they belong. Most people are like this by nature. As I see it, the world is going to collapse at the hands of those who take pleasure in doing charitable works. They distribute their cheap sympathy without hesitation. They comfort anyone, encourage anyone. Because of them, unscrupulous people stand up again right after being punished and continue their evildoing. Because they were supported, they would do even worse. No, I can’t shake hands with you now. I don’t sympathize with you at all. My beloved cousin doesn’t sympathize with you, either. All our lives, the ones we’ve abhorred most are those who take pleasure in charitable works. If, after learning this painful lesson, you want to climb to a new beginning, if you take my advice, I can give you a thread of hope, but I am definitely not going to shake hands with you. If I did, you’d become even vainer and forget all the troubles you’re facing. You’d sink into complacency again and you’d become flighty again. That’s just the way people are. Go ahead and keep that thread of hope. I’ll be watching you closely and hoping for your success. Please keep in mind: even if you succeed, you mustn’t imagine that you can shake hands with me. I’ll point out many of your other shortcomings, and I’ll probably make you out to have no redeeming features. Only in this way will you improve. I loathe mediocrity. I have something else to declare: it’s about swallowing saliva. I hear that people on the street criticize me a lot for this, just as if it’s something indelicate they can’t bear to see. They also allege that I have to swallow saliva three times for every sentence I speak. You just heard what it’s really like. I talked for so long, and yet I didn’t interrupt myself even once to swallow. My self-control is astonishing. As I said, there isn’t anything I can’t do. Inferior people sling mud at me in secret. They think if they mention a certain tiny shortcoming of a certain person, they can then exclude this person from the ranks of the worthies forever. Please. Who doesn’t have shortcomings? The personages who made history often had shortcomings that broke through, but that didn’t affect their greatness. What matters is a person’s essence and inherent ability. Some idiosyncratic shortcomings are perhaps signs of being worthy people. I loathe mediocrity. A mediocre person without any shortcomings has absolutely no excuse for living in this world.’ ’’
2. SOME IMPLICATIONS
Now we are ready to enter the core of the story. We couldn’t objectively narrate this in a routine way: Traditional styles wouldn’t work; we had to innovate. Otherwise, people might start fighting for position. The walls might get damaged and the houses collapse. They might do anything. Or-who knows? — they might start quacking in unison like ducks, so no one could hear anyone else-quack from morning to night, and from night to morning, until you’d go crazy and give up. Over a long period, the furtive personal relationship between X and Q had become the spiritual sustenance for everyone on Five Spice Street. On the surface, we disavowed this, even scorned it, but in fact-night after night-everyone was caught up in dreams. Each one took part in the game, imagining himself the leading actor. During the day, whenever they heard of something happening, they would rush to the scene and inspect it closely. They were collecting traces to fuel their imaginations. Such actions were always taken alone. Frequent small-group discussions always took place in a certain person’s house either with a dim light or with all the lights extinguished. It’s said that talking about such things in the dark was ‘‘even more dramatic.’’ The writer obtained his materials in just such a place.
After his big mistake, the writer was abandoned by his readers. Luckily the widow enlightened him, and once he won his readers over again, he regained his composure and became steadier. He no longer engaged in his art ‘‘by shutting himself in a small room,’’ but lost no time reimmersing himself in the crowd, ‘‘bending over their chests to listen to them breathe.’’ In this way, he promoted himself and became much more philosophical about himself and society, and much more confident.
In our discussions, we used to squeeze together, head against head, smelling each other’s breath. Then, we lowered our voices, making them fainter than the buzzing of mosquitoes. It was as if we weren’t talking at all, just moving our lips. We could only guess what others were saying from the movements of their lips. Certain ideas were communicated in a very subtle way. For example, ‘‘spare-time recreation’’ was not completely the same as sex, but neither was it completely the same as ‘‘platonic friendship.’’ These are both extreme interpretations. We couldn’t accept either; but arguing against one view wasn’t the same as advocating the other. We had to distinguish the boundaries. And we distinguished on the basis of barely perceptible lip movements. Only the in-group could understand the profound meaning of these movements. If the lights weren’t on, we reached our conclusions on the basis of buzzing sounds.
This kind of get-together was so interesting. Everyone was left with lasting memories. Today, years later, many still sigh and say they wish time could reverse itself-if only it could stop in that moment filled with mysterious conviviality, if only they could enjoy once more that grand throbbing of body and mind, they wouldn’t mind having their lives cut short by a decade or two. That joy is gone forever. Only bleak melancholy remains. Those get-togethers in pitch-dark rooms, those swaying ghostly silhouettes on the walls, those voiceless furtive whispers, and the excitement of imagining oneself in the leading actor’s role during long sleepless nights: where did all of these things go? Such sweet memories! If a person has the good fortune to reenter that realm once or twice when he is old, he can die without regrets. The writer lost no time joining in. Of course, he didn’t go to hear them ‘‘say something.’’ If he’d been motivated only by this, he would have run into a wall. The old ways were dead. You had to innovate because you couldn’t ‘‘really hear’’ what anybody said. It was a thought movement, highly sentimental and inferential. Comprehending it depended on ‘‘intelligence.’’
The writer had quite a lot of talent and after hard practice gradually grasped certain main points that allowed him to enter that realm and obtain a lot. He transformed his old flamboyant, shallow writing style into one that stressed character and true feelings in a dignified way. He got rid of priggishness and turgid prose; he noted his feelings and embellished them imaginatively to represent reality.
The First Point: How Did X and Q’s Adultery Begin?
Let’s start our analysis with Mr. Q. As we said, he is a good husband and father with a devoted wife and two sons. They all love the rural life, growing melons and vegetables in their front and back gardens and raising cats, dogs, and rabbits. His only shortcomings are being superstitious and believing in fate. But it’s precisely this that broke up his family. Ever since that lovely afternoon when he went calling and Madam X secretly told his fortune in that stifling room (we have no way of knowing the details), he changed into a person who had lost all reason and common sense. Sometimes, he unexpectedly even acted like a gangster: he was completely different from the simple, honest person he’d been before.
He announced to a friendly colleague: from now on, he would give up his self-restraint and be guided by destiny. This was providence, whose force was overwhelming. He had no way to resist it. All he could do was submit. If in the future this did him in, that was also providence. His eyes were wide open, his pupils unmoving, as he said this, and his teeth ‘‘chattered.’’ His colleague asked what was going on, but he didn’t hear and just spoke vaguely of some intersection, something about Wednesdays. He was agitated and his voice was shaking. Then he crowed like a rooster: his voice was magnificent. He kept crowing. His neck was puffy and his face reddened. His colleagues shouted for help, but he calmed down: ‘‘This is the way I am,’’ he told them. ‘‘All of you can see this. I’ve been a little crazy all along, though I covered it up well. When I sit at my desk in the office, I’m often seized by an impulse to jump up on the desk and crow like a rooster, as you just saw. For years, I’ve kept myself from doing this in public.’’