Chapter 5 "The Matter of Writing" Part III Destined Writing

"Forty without confusion, fifty to know the destiny", there seems to be something wrong with this saying: forty is no longer confused, how can fifty know the destiny?Since the destiny is known at fifty, why not be confused at forty?If you still don't know (not to mention the destiny), can you pretend not to be confused? Boldly make a little explanation for the ancients: it is very possible that the age of forty does not involve destiny (or fate), but the skills of dealing with the world are already familiar, the eyes of discerning people and things have been mature, whether they are humble or chic or arrogant or bossy, each Human behavior can be put in the right place; destiny is another matter, and it will take another ten years to understand.After another ten years, I finally understand: Mandate of Heaven is incomprehensible.No confusion ends in the domain of daily affairs. Once you ask about the destiny, confusion will come from it, and fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty-year-olds are also bound to be confused. From this, we know that destiny can only be known and the unknowable.The reason why the ancients sentenced Buhuo to forty and did not keep it until the end must have hinted at this.

Confusion is distance: the expansion of space, the delay of time, the running of the body, the search of the soul, so writing is endless.Man is a very stupid animal: he knows what he can't know, but he never loses his desire to know.Man is a very intelligent animal: he enjoys his life in the endless journey of knowledge.Man is a serious and stubborn animal: if one hears the truth in the morning, one may die in the evening.Man is a kind of open-minded and cunning animal: play life.Humans are also a very dangerous animal: not only torturing each other, but also torturing their mother earth.Man is thus again an animal of severe punishment or long servitude: misery is ever around to watch over them.Wait and wait and finally: Man is a rare animal in the world that can dream.

That's the reason for writing.Romance (not "ism") will never go out of fashion, because there is a reality that constantly feeds it hormones and multivitamins in a "confused" way. As for myself, why write?The first is to make a living, the second is to realize the value (not necessarily for praise, but not to be ignored and deleted, of course, the taste of praise is always tempting), and then there are more whys.Now I think, one is to not be stuck in reality, so the other is to maintain and strengthen people's dreams, especially the ability to dream. As for what writing is, I first thought it was a profession, then I thought it was a kind of honor, then I thought it was a kind of belief, and now I even believe that writing is a kind of destiny.It's not that fate doesn't want me to lay bricks and code words, but it means that no matter what a person does, he can't escape the word "confused", so the act of writing takes place.Also, I said this in a letter to a friend: "What to write and how to write are more like fate, and have nothing to do with doctrine and genre. Once the boundless and chaotic voices that already exist in my heart If you write them, you will hardly be able to think about 'what should and should not be written'... Everything is a foregone conclusion, it was there irrevocably when you didn't write it, All you can do is listen and follow. If you are skilled, you can hear more and follow closer, but no matter how great you are, there is an infinite distance between you and them. Therefore, Inspiration, skill, cleverness, and ingenuity are all ascribed to praying, as praying to God to give you a chance (a path)."

With the help of a computer, I just finished a long story (thank you computer, it would be exhausting without it) in which there is this passage: "Where do your poems come from? What does your brain base your poems on? What about line-by-line poetry? You must see a mass of chaos before writing, you must pursue that mass of chaos while writing, and you must find that you are still very far away from that mass of chaos after writing. The chaos that motivates you to write is where your soul is, and maybe that's where all the world's news is woven in disorder. You're trying to see it, to express it—the brain is at work, and before that, the There is chaos already there, the soul before your intellect, the soul of poetry before your lines. How you try to approach it is the brain's business; how close you can be to it, that is The taste of your poetry; you can never be equal to it, then it is doomed to the endless road of writing, it proves that the brain can never catch up with the soul, so the brain and the soul must be two different things." For more than ten years, the only experience is not to let the brain control the soul, but let the soul operate the brain and press the keyboard of the computer.