Chapter 2 Preface: I judge myself to be honest

I will be sixty next year.Nietzsche wrote Behold this Man at the age of forty-four, and Rousseau finished it at the age of fifty-eight.I do not intend to compare myself with Nietzsche and Rousseau at all, but just want to explain that it is not too early for me to write an autobiography. I often don't realize my age.When I think about my age, it is often when people ask me about me, people will look surprised and disbelieving at this time, and I have to feel sorry for the fact.Almost everyone thinks I'm not my age, including myself.I believe that my youthful appearance is not mainly due to my appearance, but to my mentality, which will be reflected in my demeanor. It must be my demeanor that deceives people, otherwise people will see an older face.A friend teased me that the key to keeping a man young is to marry a young wife, and I have no intention of contradicting that.My young wife and young daughter make up my most frequent living environment, like a mirror that I look at all the time. I look at myself in this mirror, and I have the illusion that I am also young, and as time goes by, the illusion will fade away. As if come true.However, on the other hand, I am also such a mirror of my wife. She still feels young when she takes a picture every day, which to some extent shows the quality of the mirror.

However, I clearly know that being young in mind or looking young is not the same as actually being young.As well-meaning people have advised me, I'm at an age when I need to be careful.I probably won't be too careful, one is not used to it, and the other is that I don't believe it will be of great use.Although there is no basis, I am sure that everyone's lifespan is a fixed number. If you are too careless, it may be shortened, but if you are too careful, it cannot be extended.I can't predict my own lifespan, even if I can, I don't want to, I don't want to worry about things that I can't control.However, the reminder from well-meaning people still has an effect on me, which is to make me face up to my age.No matter how much I yearn for a long life, I can't pretend that I won't die, I don't know that I will die, everything seems to end suddenly but in fact it will only patronize others, not me.I am a worrying person who likes to prepare for what is bound to come.Even if I lived a long life, let's say eighty or ninety years old, twenty or thirty years is not too long to prepare for such a major event as death.Now that I take up the pen to write down my life so far, it is part of the preparation, what Montaigne called the act of packing.After doing this, I did feel a sense of relief.

Therefore, in a certain sense, this book can be called the spiritual autobiography of a mortal man.Chateaubriand titled his autobiography Memoirs from the Tomb, which I understand perfectly well.A person who places himself in the tomb in advance and looks back on his life from death, will have a fundamental honesty, because at this time he is facing himself and God.People only need to cover up or lie when facing others. What the self-deceitful person is facing is not the real self, but the role he plays in front of others.When I was writing this book, I always imagined that I was standing in front of an omniscient and omnipotent God. God knew all about my actions and even my most secret thoughts, and could understand them all, so it was neither possible nor necessary to conceal them.My understanding of human nature is enough to allow me to see myself outside the ego to a certain extent, to face all my experiences calmly, and I am not even ashamed to speak out the privacy in the eyes of ordinary people.My purpose is to give myself and the God in my mind a frank account. I believe that only in this way can the things I write have some value to the world. A reference worth taking seriously.

Of course, I am still living in this world after all, and I am inextricably linked with it.So, in fact, I can't tell the whole truth, only part of the truth.My request to myself is that everything that can be said must tell the truth, never tell lies, and keep silent about what cannot be said.Part of the so-called unspeakable is that others are involved, and speaking out may cause harm to others.I have no personal enemies in this world, and I don't want to hurt anyone.Only on occasions that have nothing to do with private life, when I believe that important facts and principles are at stake, do I make certain critical statements or comments, but not directed at any individual.However, I beg your pardon for the fact that some of the most memorable experiences in my life have actually been made up of relationships with some special other people. I cannot narrate my own experience without writing about them.For example, when describing my emotional experience, it is impossible for me to avoid writing about the women with whom I have had an intimate relationship.I can only apologize to them if they feel offended by it.But, as the reader will see, when I look back on the course of my life, if my heart is filled with gratitude, it is to the women who have been or are by my side that I am grateful first.

In this book, I try to look at myself from a standpoint that is both caring and detached, and see how I have gone from childhood to today and become who I am now.What I want to focus on is my spiritual process, that is, when the main factors that constitute my spiritual quality were initially formed, when they were basically finalized, and in what ways they appeared at various stages of life.If I want to sum up my outlook on life in one sentence, it is true temperament.I have never regarded success as the main goal of life, and I think that only by living out my true temperament can I not waste my life.The so-called true temperament, on the one hand, is the emphasis on personality and inner spiritual value, and on the other hand, it is the underestimation of external utilitarianism.In retrospect, I found that this outlook on life of mine was actually rooted in my early personality, and it was the product of that personality's experience in the later environment.When I was young, I was a child who was sensitive to some morbidity. On the one hand, this kind of personality made me pay close attention to my inner feelings, and on the other hand, I was clumsy in dealing with the external world, and I was afraid and guarded against it.The former led me to increasingly immerse myself in an intellectual life dominated by reading and writing and an emotional life dominated by sex and parent-child love, from which I obtained the most important pleasure in life, and the latter naturally developed into Indifferent attitude towards external utilitarianism.It may be said that my aloofness stems from my incompetence, but I am content with my incompetence in this regard.In the final analysis, human energy is limited, and if one does something, one must not do something, and the great difference between people lies in the different orientations of what to do and what not to do.Sensitivity and indifference—or persistence and detachment—constitute the two poles of my temperament. This book describes the process of the two coexisting and growing, that is, my temperament journey.

The book is divided into four parts, which are written in chronological order, including childhood and adolescence, the period of college, the period of exercising and working in the countryside after graduation, and the period of returning to Beijing for postgraduate study and philosophical research.When a person recalls his own life, he is often governed by the opposite principle of perspective. He finds that even the smallest things in childhood seem large, and the most recent events seem relatively small.The first part is written in small childhood memories, but there are no trivial things in childhood, and the earliest impressions of life are particularly vivid because they are written on white paper. Others think that trivial details may have played a major role in the formation of my personality.The second part occupies the largest proportion in the whole book, and more pages recall Guo Shiying, because he is the person who has influenced my life, and the direction of my spiritual pursuit in my life was established under his influence.If the reader wants to know how a man with strong spiritual instincts spent the long lonely years in the countryside, he may find the answer in the third volume.The fourth part has the largest time span, but the length is relatively small, and the tone seems a bit hasty.My justification for this is that many things are in the present continuous tense and lack the necessary distance for recall.However, my life path has a basic destination here, so I express my mature understanding of myself and the world in this part.

It is almost impossible for any autobiography to be a portrait of the author's self-image without self-beautification, and I know I will be no exception.Even if he is as frank as Rousseau, when he presents his bad deeds in the novel, isn't he proud of it at the same time, so he is actually showing the richness and excellence of his humanity in another way?The only thing I can promise is that my attitude is serious, and I am really serious about asking myself to be honest.I can at least say that in this age of celebrity showmanship, I'm not putting on a show.Therefore, I advise readers who like to watch celebrity shows not to buy this book, lest they be disappointed.I would also like to warn the media not to extract fragments of material from the book and use them to make gossip, that would be a serious desecration of the book.I can only hope that the book will be opened by readers who, believing that the author wrote it with seriousness, will read every word of it with the same kind of heart.

Zhou Guoping May 19, 2004