When did I stop relying on paper and pen? There's no need to dig deep into that; the answer comes at once. The written word: I've loved it for eight years, at one point so much that I had to carry a little notebook and a pen with me everywhere. When I first fell in love with the written word, Guo Jingming was still a sentimental big boy, and in most people's eyes Han Han was still mostly a rebellious brat. Guo Jingming wrote back then that he liked holding a pen and writing on sheet after sheet of smooth, clean white paper.
I love that feeling too. White paper is spotless; writing on it is like looking in a mirror. Anything affected or untrue, once written down, gives you a strong urge to cross it out. And white paper stands for infinite possibility, as if it could stretch on forever: however far your thoughts can go, the pen can go. Paper is thin, but good paper always has a particular texture to the touch, and what that feeling tells you is not that it has no depth, but that its depth is hard to measure. Close your eyes and imagine the tree this sheet came from, from bud to towering height, through how much wind and rain, cloud and sun; imagine which light breath of air those fibres first came from, how they grew bit by bit, silently, longer and longer, longer and longer, knitting into nets that are natural and random yet hold hidden rules..... And you can trace it further back, to before this tree, to the infinitely distant past. What grandeur is this, what beauty that exhausts the imagination?
When I write for my own amusement, I usually take out a sheet or two first, not necessarily pure white or of any great quality, but it has to be flat. My first drafts are so scrawled that basically only I can read them. When I finish, I usually put them down wherever, and when I take them out again a while later they're often crumpled; only the occasional one I value especially gets properly put away. Crumpled is all right, but the bottom line is that nothing can be missing, because the next step is to copy the text out carefully onto fresh white paper, revising as I copy. Once revised, it gets put away again, and some time later, if the mood takes me, I may take it out and revise it again. So after all these years, untidy as I am, a drawer of my desk set aside for the purpose is stuffed with all sorts of drafts in a complete jumble.
I used to be a little in love with my own handwriting, though historically it has indeed not received much praise. In fact, whatever the handwriting is like, when characters that belong to you, that stand for your own thoughts and feelings, take shape and line up under your pen on the paper, the satisfaction (or call it achievement) is irreplaceable. And it is precisely because this is unique that it makes you treat every character and every word you're about to write with care, and in the light of this attitude, wrong characters, errors and poor rhetoric naturally dwindle to a minimum. And each sheet of white paper is given a whole new meaning by you, newer than the paper itself, but with a source perhaps even more ancient than the paper's (I have always believed that all things have some transcendent connection, even across the bounds of time and space, so even a new spark may come from the sediment of long ages).
People who write a lot will always have marks built up over the years on their fingers. On my right middle finger, for instance, at the base of the nail on the side where the pen rests, there's a layer of something like a callus but not quite, faintly bluish, and the whole joint bulges a little compared with my left hand. Since everyone holds a pen a bit differently, the hands of those who love to write (好书, with 好 read in the fourth tone, hào, "to love", please note) won't all be like mine, but they're sure to show similar signs. Legend has it that when Lu Yu, the Sage of Tea, dipped his finger in water, the colour of tea would spread from it; so for the ancients who were masters of paper, ink, brush and inkstone, perhaps their calluses bore the colours of gold ink and painting. I described it earlier as something built up over the years; really it's also the sediment of time, and more than that, the growth rings of feeling.
When the ancients wrote, they surely had a whole set of customs. Even in his humble room, Liu Yuxi still had to "tune the plain zither and read the golden sutras" (from his "Inscription for a Humble Room", translated for this page; let's take the two as conditions for each other), not to mention grinding ink, and perhaps also sitting still in meditation, burning incense, bathing and so on. In today's fast-paced life, all this could easily be mocked as fussy formalities, with a whiff of pedantry. But on second thought, rules that fit their time and world are part of culture. People can't break free of rules, just as people can't refuse culture. Of course, "culture" here isn't the "culture" we mean when we sneer at someone for "having no culture"; it is a mode or system of thinking, the root ideas and concepts a group needs to come into being.
Paper and pen have flowed in China's blood for a thousand years, carrying the culture of this ancient land down the veins of history for a thousand years. Many customs and rules arrived in a hurry carrying different cultures, and vanished just as fast, or changed beyond recognition through collision and fusion. But paper and pen have come down through the long ages to the present; once the carriers of culture and civilization, they have themselves become a culture, an eternal, beautiful legend.
Yet this legend, it seems, is also walking the road to extinction, going, going further away.
Without my noticing, there's no longer a sheet of smooth, handsome paper around me, or a fine pen that sits well in my hand. My fingers' memory of pen and paper is gradually being taken apart and eaten away by the layout of keys on a keyboard, and all that endlessly rich meaning, that boundlessly alive spirit, has been swapped for the dry descriptions produced by humanity's clumsy programming languages. Perhaps it's inevitable that paper and pen are replaced, and the new tools do have many advantages, but a beautiful coat can only set off a gorgeous exterior; inside is a huge, worm-eaten hole. People are always like this: for short-term prospects they throw away the treasures of the past, and step by step turn their backs on the spirit that nature spent hundreds of millions of years giving them. Slogans about the future sound very nice, but without a past there's no present, let alone a future.
Watching these words, which have lost their edges like dry grass stripped down to its fibres, go on line after line across the screen, I can't help imagining: if one day paper and pen really do leave people's lives completely, we will surely need some descriptions and records of them to hand down to later generations, and when even these tributes can only be recorded and passed on through arrays of virtual symbols, will there still be a few people who feel even the slightest flutter?
Perhaps the answer is no, because by then paper and pen will have lost even the right to a corner of memory.
That night,
no paper, no pen.
2011.03