University Town

The city is something one can enter, and those already inside have also longed to get out. After Qian Zhongshu completed that timeless masterwork, everything that followed seems to carry the shadow of Fang Hongjian. Back when we were very young, someone told us that the greatest temptation of all was the word "university." In the memories of childhood, college students were almost deified figures — from a distance, you could still make out the faint halo around them. And once someone in the family made it into university, they became a symbol, a boundary stone, a swift torrent cutting across the path of those racing forward. To surpass it meant dawn; dawn would lead us to surpass again and again. So we set out toward the sun in our hearts like Kuafu, and though after midday our course bent the wrong way, we still believed in ourselves, in tomorrow, in the day we would embrace each other somewhere in the east. Once that journey began, there was only the road ahead — though we sometimes wandered, though we were sometimes bewitched by the landscape, who could stop our steps toward the longed-for city? Who ever has? Thick walls, gates shut tight; hawks circle high above and dive in, while sparrows hover around them singing mournfully. Who would have thought that the driving force comes from the most primal of desires, that ideals are the most ignorant of impulses — and that both of these are, in the end, vanity. After entering university, looking back, isn't this experience the very picture of that stretch of Fang Hongjian's life when he went to take up a teaching post? We were equally lost, equally given up, equally had our days of jolting carriage rides, equally had our share of official seals stamped everywhere, equally wolfed down roasted sweet potatoes, equally trudged through mud... Each of us is a city; we keep entering, keep leaving. It is only upon entering university that we thought we'd stepped into a palace — but in truth the palace too is a city, a sealed, sleepless one. We thought the strongest fortress was hard to attack and easy to defend, that a city easy to defend and hard to attack was the surest place to live and work in peace. But what rises here is not a kind of striving; it has become a paradise for escaping society. A school is, in truth, a temple — it gives you an idea, gives you a path, and we have all, on the road to the west, chased after the White Bone Demon. The school piles up layer by layer into a pagoda, and we are the sweeper monks, with the relic at the very top. We sweep downward, layer by layer, in pursuit of a so-called purity of mind — and in the end all the dust piles up on the lowest floor, blocking the doors, blocking the windows, blinding the sight. And so some see a throng of blind men, like starving flies in a lonely desert, darting this way and that, tearing each other apart. We cannot walk out of university, and we do walk out, and the sunlight only stings the eyes; we cannot walk out of university, and we do walk out, but our hearts are thick with dust, our figures worn, our futures blurred. Some did walk out; those who did not became dust themselves, and that city, that floor, lay completely barren. The wind rose, the wind grew strong, dust whirled across the sky, and so came the dust storm; so some planted trees, some stored water, some went bankrupt, some grew rich overnight. From one corner of society a strange force rose up, and the fringe became the mainstream. Some things vanished, some things grew; what vanished is seen no more, and what grows will one day vanish too. A block of tofu is soft all the way through, but once fried with meat it seems savory and delicious. Just so with university — from the buildings to the students, all is listless, but with a diploma in hand, it suddenly looks full of vigor and life. Tofu is bland, so most people come for the meat; once the meat is eaten, the tofu is left behind. The black-hearted owner therefore needs only one sharp waiter and one clever cook to save a fortune on tofu. As it happens, those who eat this dish are themselves none of them free of a black heart. One kind of thought has ruled for several thousand years of history — such thought and such history are both diseased, the way an institution or a habit, prolonged too long, ends up riddled with holes. In truth, university is not a place but a kind of thought; only thought in motion has life, for the still is just a beacon, and what moves is the water that never ceases to flow — a传承 that never runs dry. And yet such thought, like that pagoda, the more sweepers there are, the less clean it looks. Always advancing, always retreating, we are a single point,穿梭 back and forth through time and space. We are only a point — no matter the coordinates, just a point, because one set of coordinates can only hold one point. So whether you label it A, B, or C makes no real difference; the goal is what is essential. A leaf, in falling, always leaves a gap on some tree — trace it back to the root, and there will be a result after all.