A few months ago, one evening, I finished reading a book and felt that I wanted to write something. So I left the campus and walked along a narrow path, thinking carefully and talking things through with AI. A few days later, I sat before the screen, still struggling. Looking at the broken, discontinuous fragments of text, I thought to myself: here is yet another project left half-finished.
Writing has always been a difficulty for me. I am not good at carefully conceiving and structuring an essay. Unless I am swept along by emotion, almost to the point of losing myself, writing feels like nothing but torment. Most of my long, unrestrained outpourings exist in only two places: my diary and my letters.
It seems that I know only how to write about myself—to express, in different forms, my understanding of “I”: my doubts, my thoughts, my way of seeing things. When I want to write these things down, the words emerge like droplets seeping from a mountainside, gradually gathering into a stream. Everything happens naturally. I do not need to decide in advance where the water ought to flow.
And yet, whenever I consciously set out to write an “essay,” everything begins to fall into disorder. I strain without realizing it, but can find no direction. In the end, all that remains is a scattering of disjointed phrases and a mass of tangled thoughts—just as it is now.
“The limits of language are the limits of the world.” My understanding of life, like my writing, seems always to be governed by passion.
When passion, love, or some other indescribable force of life arrives, my steps seem to grow lighter and my eyes brighter. Everything in the world feels complete, and love and happiness seem eternal. Loss is a form of happiness, because only through loss does gaining become possible. Want is also happiness, because it is want that makes fulfilment possible. Presence is happiness; absence is happiness too.
At such moments, I do not ask why I should live, nor do I repeatedly weigh whether a particular choice is right. My choice is life itself, and life itself is enough.
But this feeling never lasts.
Perhaps it was real while it was there, but first of all, it was only a feeling. When it comes, I almost believe it to be eternal; when it leaves, it is as though it had never existed. That is why I can only call it “passion.” It is like dew, like lightning, like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow.
When that wholeness breaks apart, pain arrives all at once. And yet pain, too, remains part of the wholeness.
I do not know how to describe it. Cold and heat appear to be opposites, yet perhaps they are merely the same sensation extending in different directions. Loss and gain, want and fulfilment, pain and happiness are not always divided by a clear boundary.
Of course, it is also possible that I am merely clinging to a familiar way of living. I cannot say for certain.
In any case, existence itself seems to make life something pleasurable, because suffering and joy both arise from within. For a while, the spirit no longer stands opposed to the world, but dissolves into it. Perhaps this is a kind of aesthetic life: like being at a concert or a carnival, where no one asks what purpose the music serves, but simply moves with it.
And yet, wherever there is unity, there must also be separation.
Once separation appears, the world contains both you and me. And once there is an “I,” a person begins to ask: Who am I? What is my purpose?
I suspect that these questions have no answers waiting for us in advance. We are simply placed in the world. By the time we become capable of perceiving it, everything has already begun. We know only that we exist, and then we go on interacting with the world, tracing through that interaction a path we call “time.”
Within this interaction, things are gradually given names, forms, and certainties. Five thousand years of civilization amount to little more than sixty complete human lives laid end to end. What we call the vastness of history is only a succession of short-lived people, each passing an unfinished world into the hands of the next.
Story upon story accumulates into the shape of the world. I must understand, recognize, and accept some of these descriptive constructions, because they provide the ground upon which I can make sense of my own experience.
But what of the others?
Must I also believe in those things that were constructed by human beings, yet later treated as absolute goals—those prescriptive stories that tell us not only where we are, but where we must go?
Above all, there are the measurements imposed upon the course of a life: progress, stages, deadlines, age, planning, success. They no longer merely help us conduct our lives; they begin to prescribe them. Life comes to resemble a form prepared in advance, with an answer that must be entered into every box at every stage.
I hate a life deferred.
Uncertain time is life itself, and yet it seems to have become a resource to be spent for the sake of tomorrow. I am haunted by the illusion that I can—and must—control and command it. And so I am destined to set out upon a road without end, a road leading toward success and tomorrow, only to stop at a crossroads called death—perhaps at the very next step, perhaps two steps away, or perhaps three, four, or five.
Looking back, I may have obtained what I wanted.
Or perhaps I did not.
All right. I do not know why I have begun talking about time again. Perhaps it is because of that book.
Then how, exactly, should I live?
I am already living.
And how, exactly, should I begin to write?
The pen in my hand has already begun.
Tomorrow I will forget. Today I already know. The day after tomorrow, I will remember again.
For now, this is how it is.