A Boat on the Lake

Each of us lives on an island in the middle of a lake. We can see the vast landscape beyond our little island. We want to examine this island we call home more closely, but standing on it, trying to see the whole thing — that's like trying to see the back of your own head.

From beyond the island, loudspeakers occasionally broadcast all kinds of noise, drifting across the water, pumping us full of contradictory truths. A golden honeybee says the island lacks flowers. A brown squirrel says it's missing trees. Are flowers what we need? Are trees what we can't do without? So we want to leave this island, swim across the lake, and place ourselves in the open fields beyond, hoping to view our island — the one we depend on for survival — from every angle.

In everyday life, we constantly encounter maxims and proverbs that flatly contradict each other yet both seem to make sense. As the saying goes, "The devil is in the details" — but another saying goes, "Great people don't sweat the small stuff." One says, "Haste makes waste," while another insists, "Strike while the iron is hot."

These seemingly-true-yet-not declarations leave us unsure whom to believe, so we grab whichever ones seem to protect us and use them to arm ourselves. We grow accustomed to this dangerous behavior, following doctrines we don't fully understand but feel we need, enshrining them as our lifelong, unchanging goals.

Before an ant, a human is enormous. Before a blue whale, we are tiny. These concepts are all relative. Before wielding them as weapons, we need to first understand whether we are the ant or the whale. Otherwise, we'll be lost in a sea of relativity, unable to find an anchor for comparison.

We often become enamored with treacherous abstract concepts. These weapons possess devastating power — a single one can annihilate thousands, which is exhilarating. Some are genuinely useful, but others are extremely dangerous, and we must be wary of being consumed by them. Abstraction naturally strips away details, yet details are what compose the entirety of life. When we become fully absorbed in these weapons without consulting the detail-rich instruction manuals, danger lurks right beside us.

We love to take these weapons and open fire on whatever we've just encountered. Whether it's the destructive labels — "shill," "traitor," "feminazi" — or the trivial ones — education level, appearance, family background. We've grown so accustomed to shooting first that we've long lost the patience to actually get to know a person or thing. We use MBTI to understand someone's personality, degrees to judge their status, money to measure their worth. We personally eliminate any possibility of understanding others, then constantly wonder why we feel so lonely.

The various "-isms" and "-ologies" blooming around us are also weapons of considerable destructive power. Some feel natural in hand, some we don't know how to use, and some even come with side effects. They clash and conflict with each other, though some can blend together perfectly.

Even Newton, who could explain universal gravitation, couldn't keep himself from losing money in the stock market. The stock market is a manifestation of human nature, and human nature cannot be abstracted like mechanical theory. No one can grasp all of human nature; no one's humanity can be reduced to an abstract theory.

As human beings, we ultimately return to life — otherwise we become the living embodiment of the saying: "Having heard all the great truths, still unable to live a good life." Abstract conceptual weapons are certainly powerful, but they cannot replace the rich details of lived experience. And our life experience itself serves as the detailed instruction manual for these abstract weapons.

From a life full of details, we come to understand and learn to wield these weapons. Gradually, we discover that many weapons don't come with instruction manuals, because weapons can be infinitely replicated at no marginal cost, while life experience demands an immeasurable investment of time. Our lives can no longer withstand the side effects these weapons inflict upon us.

But since there are infinitely replicable weapons, there must also be infinitely replicable instruction manuals. These manuals that can partially supplement our life experience — they are novels, or more broadly, literary works represented by novels. Novels can, on a shallow level, lead us to sample the lives of people we've never known. Compared to firsthand lived experience, this secondhand information gleaned from pages may seem pale and feeble. But accumulation is powerful — with enough of these experiences, there will be small moments of insight, small expansions of scenery we'd never seen before.

Through these experiences, we gradually find the weapons that suit us and come to understand their true purpose. But sometimes we must guard against the urge to fire these weapons prematurely along the way. It's not uncommon for someone to dislike a character in a novel and then hate the entire book — or even despise its author.

In The Moon and Sixpence, the protagonist abandons his family, neglects his wife and children — he is so devoid of social and familial responsibility. Whatever the book is trying to say, we don't have the time to find out. Clearly the book is evil, and Maugham is detestable. In No Longer Human, the narrator is an alcoholic, a womanizer, someone who attempts suicide multiple times. Regardless of his past experiences, these are things he should never have done. Therefore Dazai is beyond redemption.

After growing accustomed to living in a symbolized world, we also grow accustomed to examining the world through expectant eyes — what is beautiful, what is evil — in this lifeless world where nothing ever changes. We cannot accept anything outside this framework. For some, a perfect path was laid out before them from birth. The best way to break this stillness is naturally to walk down paths we've never tread, to learn to appreciate flowers whose names we cannot call. But beyond that, novels also have the power to shatter this beautiful structure — as long as we don't place them inside the structure to admire.

After seeing enough things that deviate from the script on the roadside, we slowly discover that those subtle, nearly imperceptible details are precisely what makes life vibrant and wonderful. Meanwhile, that magnificent, opulent palace — utterly lifeless.

If we lack the ability to swim across the lake alone to the open fields beyond — novels are perhaps the reeds swaying in the wind by the shore. Gathered together, they can form a small boat to carry us across the water. And in the journey forward, we will eventually find the direction we want to go.