The Jinan winter that 老舍 set down on paper has, at this moment, lost every trace of its gentle warmth in his eyes. Jinan in winter has become a lone island — or say that between this year’s autumn and winter there has spread the loneliness of the world’s end.
Among the old buildings and older trees along Nanxinzhuang West Road there is a half-landing in a stairwell. The stairwell is a sheer cliff where sobbing runs unchecked; behind the broken cliff, a grand waterfall of tears drops out of the sky, and at the waterfall’s foot lies a vast gold tablet of exemption from death, valid no longer, giving off the reek of rusted, rotting metal and a dull, gone-dark sheen.
He once said that he loathed all of this and savored all of it in the same breath, and so he would not leave and would not refuse — settled in things as they were, yet seized at intervals by the urge to tear free of everything that held him fast. He knew that the sky-blue cloud in his memory, fragrant and soft, was never as clean as he wanted it to be.
At that he glanced toward the southern sky, and his thoughts drifted loose, back to the first tender melody of his life, and to another figure, clean to the marrow, dim and dark by lamplight at a window. He covered his face and wept at the sound of murmured words; a blurred film of water rose in his eyes with the hazed shimmer of Gusu’s misted rain. All at once he saw a slender figure in a red dress, an oil-paper umbrella open above her, pass slowly across his nineteenth year — like the fountain pen lost and found again, only to scatter at last back into the sea of people, bound for no one knows where; like the summer polar bear that changed hands and changed hands until it went to places it had never been and met people it had never seen.
The years flow through the heart like a poem, and some figures have lived themselves into white moonlight. Perhaps even what is now flogged by every tongue and pen will in the end become that high-hung “jade-chime moon of the mortal world in the azure night” (人间玉玲青霄月), leaving nothing behind but attachment, remembrance, and a sweet reluctance to let go. But the cursed scar, black hole that it is, exists as plain fact and cannot be dissolved: whenever a corner of memory grazes that forbidden ground, despair and helplessness pierce through every warm defense straight to the floor of the heart, and he drops as into an ice cellar, mouth unable to speak, eyes unable to see.
At midnight he often bolted upright, chewing over the shreds of a dream that minutes earlier had not yet wholly dissolved into froth; in those moments he heard with perfect clarity his own labored breathing and the sleep-talk rising and falling all around, and it scarcely seemed the human world. He would wave a hand vaguely at the air in front of him, as if to touch something slowly dispersing there — something that did not exist.
The full stop draws infinitely near a perfect circle, yet the stroke goes on crawling after the ink-stain where it began, no end in sight. Some day, when the full stop is at last set down, a breeze will pass, and a fine, close-woven layer of time will stream away along the street the wind has crossed.
There is a lyric in the classical style fitted to Luv letter[2]. Its first line, at the 11-second mark, is: “My mortal world — you have already written it for me.” In truth there is no such thing as destiny, no one appointed by heaven; there is only meeting early and keeping company long. Like the ancestral clock at the close of Fortress Besieged, mocking and sorrowful, time comes once more to govern everything: slowly it lifts the cover from a past that could not go with the wind, kindles the entanglement that will coil through a lifetime, and buries what was once held treasure.
Someone said an old love is like WiFi: so long as no one who came after has changed the password, meet again and you connect again — there is no helping it. But when every network, every protocol of love, lies smashed past mending, the broken mirror is no longer merely a broken mirror: it is glass ground to powder. Glass grounds are nothing like haws — the haw is a fruit that crumbles the sweeter it gets, and sweetens the more it crumbles; nor are they sugarcane, sweet on the tongue as a fall into a honey jar, chewed at the last to nothing but mouthfuls of dregs.
The little fox, too, was once a rose — though not the little prince’s. And the rose will one day be a little fox — no longer the little prince’s, either. Thank her, for letting another her meet him grown. And whoever truly reads the tale clear has long since lost the power to be anyone’s rose at all.
In the end he cannot remember the last sentence each of them spoke as she left. Sometimes the rain was too loud and blurred out the whole night; sometimes the slap rang too sharp and startled the long-familiar scripted lies; sometimes, sleepless on his side, he felt the tears run down his face and pool into his ear. He took himself for a deep-feeling, sentimental seed; in truth, one fears, he only meant to scatter seed wherever he went. Listening to the song that belonged to each stretch of years, he would let the pressing business at hand slip from sight, sinking into the deep sea of memory, bearing the crushing pressure of a brief devotion. He kept, it is true, to that godfather-grade maxim — “a man has no need to plead against a hundred mouths; a woman has no need at all to play the pitiable part” — yet at times he badly wanted to ask himself: do you still have it in you to love someone?
So it is true after all that there is no going back, and what one misses is the memory. You stood on the stone terrace by the spring, rising again and again on your toes, swaying lightly, brushing aside a few strayed strands of hair — and brushing, too, the heartstrings of a boy no hand had ever played — singing out a sorrowing song crowded with rise and fall.
Some mornings are crumbled into every spring there is. The damp wind blows over, carrying the easeful warmth of the season’s opening, and he tends to hesitate a moment — an hour this good ought to have someone here to share it — then shakes his head at his own expense: what someone? The passers-by fade off one after another, until between heaven and earth there is only him, one foot sinking deep and the other landing shallow, strolling along the inner side of the Second Ring Road.
“Nothing for it, then, but to turn the years into song, and leave them to the hills and rivers.”[3]. From then on, every fine stretch of mountain and river he walked would look the same, because whatever natural scenery this world possesses had already taken the brand of that season of time which forced its way into the years gone by.
Every departure staged with drums and banners is really a probe; the true leaving has no farewell in it. The ones who bawl at the top of their lungs that they are going are always the ones who, at the end, bend down in silence and gather up, piece by piece, the furious dignity they had dashed across the floor.
And so, one mild and sunlit afternoon, he wrapped himself in the trench coat he always wore and — like you, just as ever — waved a hand at the empty air: I’m off. Then he turned and walked north, and never came back.
Perhaps, many years on, he will have crossed the high mountains and the seas and come through the scouring literary winds of the First Department Under Heaven; roaming at ease in the breadth of literature without draining away into the void, diving into the depth of history, rising to the height of philosophy, he will have cut his road through brambles along the long, long way of learning. Literature is the study of man, and it will slowly come clear to him that everything in human nature was laid bare long ago by 鲁迅 and Dostoevsky; the most beautiful and the ugliest, the kindest and the most grievous, life as tragedy and as comedy — all of it he will see, plain and incisive to the bone, in Hugo, 曹雪芹, Baudelaire, 钱钟书, Cervantes.[1]. By then he may have learned a tenth or two of 钱钟书’s clear-eyed wisdom in the ways of the world, long past tangling with the green loves and grievances of his younger self, turned instead toward the endless cynicism of mankind’s final questions. Perhaps that is all 惠能 meant: “There never was a single thing — where, then, could dust alight?”
Just as reading literature means reading the classics, and no one can have finished the classics young, so — apart from those in this world lucky enough to meet “the one written in their fate” on the very first try — the great majority either settle in the end for a walk-through they will regret all their lives, and not the beloved phantom itself; or else, like him, drift and sink and surface in the sea of people, waiting in stillness for what may never appear at all: “plum broth in white porcelain at the height of summer, crushed ice ringing against the bowl” (盛夏白瓷梅子汤，碎冰碰壁当啷响).
“Nothing makes me stay / except my destination / though the shore holds roses, green shade, a quiet harbor / I am an unmoored boat (我是不系之舟).” It was as if he saw 徐志摩 in the full flush of his spirits taking leave of Cambridge, the flutes of parting drifting soft across the night sky; he thought of the “holy silence” in the Fahua Xuanyi, and in spite of himself he laughed.
A dozen years and more from now, he may stand on the shore of Weiming Lake, before the gates of Yanyuan, the daylight wind of Peking University pouring through the halls, students and wanderers weaving into one unreal haze, and feel that he has dreamed a very, very long dream. The love of Yanyuan, knotted a thousandfold. Sunlight will fall beside the tree-shade, neither light nor heavy, just as on countless afternoons before, tracing the outline of the old trees — trees that have cantered soundless across a thousand years, looking on at the world’s affairs and the human heart, steeped through with the great tide of letters.
Not knowing why, he is weeping like someone made all of tears.
[1]. Quoted from the Douban essay A Year On: Speaking Again of the Peking University Chinese Department Postgraduate Exam, and of Going Beyond It