What Went Unwritten

For the past two years or so I have felt that my time for free thinking has been squeezed hard. Why? Is it because work uses up too much of my energy, because I have sunk into purer kinds of entertainment, because I feel I cannot produce anything of value, or simply because I have settled into a stable state and grown lazy? Looking back, in the years before this my life was made up almost entirely of restless upheaval that never stopped. Now, though there is no lack of things that trouble me or cause me real pain, life has on the whole become much calmer.

The sparks that used to burst from my mind like an active volcano have died down. It is not that I have no new ideas at all. It is that the old habit of setting every idea out on display in my head, turning it over with care, and writing it down at the first chance has faded somewhat, and too many of the ideas that came to me went unwritten, for one reason or another. The brain is like a wilful horse at full gallop that keeps being reined in. It might say: I burn so much energy, and it means nothing at all, so why go on doing it? Little by little it gets used to it, and the voices in my head go quiet, "like water vanishing into water".¹

This world has given us a great many conveniences, but it has brought limits too. When we take 24-hour shops and restaurants, a transport network that reaches everywhere, running water, electricity, the internet and the pipes underground as much for granted as breathing, we are also tied to the spot by them. I remember a friend's surprise, not long ago, on hearing that I planned to travel on my own. To that friend, travelling alone meant far too many inconveniences, even if the inconvenience was only that, when you want to use the toilet in a restaurant, there is no one to watch your luggage.

A feeling of being kept and fed.

Of course I neither want to, nor could, climb onto some high ground and condemn such a world. I grew up in it and have benefited from it more than I can count. Besides, this life governed by the business of living is not without room for improvement. Rather than saying we have no choice, it would be truer to call it path dependence: once you set out on a road, it is hard to give it up. Life is finite.

For me, these limits show themselves, in a word, as a narrowing of the horizon. The world I can see is smaller than the one I could see when I was younger. The paradox is that, in knowledge and experience, I ought to understand the world far better now. But think about it: what is this so-called world, really? Is it a world like a wide open plain, where you can keep exploring and keep finding new views, or a world like an underground palace, where the more you learn, the deeper in you go and the harder it is to get out? I think back to the setting of the game Fallout 3. After a nuclear apocalypse, people are sealed into a vault which, like the sparrow in the Chinese saying, is small but has every organ it needs, and each generation born there lives out a carefree life within a set of rules that work like law. The wasteland outside is full of radiation, mutated creatures, gangs who live by the knife and cultists of twisted faith. The vault is more or less self-sufficient, but to keep its population sustainable, and to avoid the danger of invasion from outside, going out is forbidden. In fact, people born and raised in the vault probably never even think of leaving, and may not even know that a world outside exists, just like the protagonist's home village in the anime Gurren Lagann, and the setting of another story whose title I can't remember: a spherical space with an ecosystem inside that can support a small tribe (limited but sufficient air and organic resources), a shell of hard mineral, and only beyond that the vast universe that no one knows.

Compared with these invented closed worlds, the real world we live in seems far freer. In it, apart from things the law forbids because they go against the public good or against morality, such as murder and arson, it seems a person can choose to do anything at all. But you and I both know this is far from the truth. The truth is that however many choices there are, there are as many ways in which our hands are tied. "There is probably no world more disappointing than the real one."²

Think again about why we want choices of our own. Physical survival aside, what we want in the end is fulfilment of the spirit: to own our lives, to have peak experiences, to prove that our existence has value, to come by a life story that is ours alone, and all of this depends on one choice after another. And a story almost always takes at least two people to form. Even someone like the hero of the novel The Martian, who survives on a barren planet by drawing on every skill he has, still needs a Houston, and the whole of human society behind it, to keep searching for him and supporting him, and in the end to send people to bring him back to Earth. Even a story that truly belongs to one person alone is only fully born when it reaches listeners and readers through the narrator's mouth or pen, through interaction and sharing. In the end we still depend on others as a mirror, letting the object reflect back the meaning of the subject; otherwise everything stays trapped within itself and can only end up "like water vanishing into water".

If a choice requires us to break through a whole chain of things that tie our hands, then the road it points to must be one that people rarely walk. However wondrous and strange the sights along it, finding someone who can share and understand them is harder still. So it is with choices, and so it is with ideas; or rather, a choice is really just an idea held firmly. Sharing may stay on the surface, but understanding is rarer still. The landscape in each person's heart is unique, and how many roads can ever meet? So while we are bound by the other limits the world gives us, the ones we can see and touch, we are also bound by deeper limits like these.

As we grow older we feel more and more limits. Or rather: because others sheltered us, the world had no chance, earlier on, to show us in full the creases and lice inside its splendid robe, and while we were growing day and night like wheat, we could not yet see our own limits. The more we learn about the world and about ourselves, the more likely we are to touch edges as hard as a ceiling, and the higher the cost of choosing becomes. When all your experience points have gone into the skill tree, the tree you once climbed grows small, starlight becomes a bedside lamp, and the ocean becomes a 25-metre swimming pool. Once nearly everything can be measured in money and time, ice no longer burns our hands, and no rabbit that makes us clap in wonder can come out of a hat any more. If you can see to the end of your life at a glance, how could you not feel weary, walking such a dull road all the way to its end?

If we go on living in such a state, how much strength will we have left to care about what went unwritten?