I have always placed great emphasis on “慎言” — caution in speech. You can tell from my article “I Despise Plagiarism in Papers” that I attach great importance to being responsible for one’s own words. I believe that every extra piece of writing left in the world is an extra responsibility taken on; things in black and white cannot be denied simply because one wants to deny them. I will have to be responsible for everything I have ever written for my whole life. If one day I discover that something I wrote before is problematic, I cannot just toss off a line like, “That was what I wrote back then,” and shirk the responsibility. The only thing I can do is keep reinterpreting it, for example by explaining where I did not make myself clear at the time, or what intellectual background that piece was written against, what it was responding to, and so on. The more articles I write now, the more exhausting the explanations I will have to make in the future!
I remember a scholar once warning young people to be cautious in writing: when one is young, it is hard to avoid impatience and impulsiveness, and if the things one writes end up being regretted in the future, it will be too late. I felt this made perfect sense. So in fact my writing has always been very cautious. But if you look at my recent near-frenzied blogging, it seems to contradict the caution I keep emphasizing. The truth is, I am helpless too: as soon as I open Word, or pick up a pen, it feels as if there are so many topics wanting to burst out of my mind that once I put pen to paper they become uncontrollable. There is nothing I can do.
But I have always insisted on being responsible for my own words. I have always imagined that all of my articles could someday be taken by anyone and compiled into a “complete works”; even if no one is interested in compiling my complete works, I myself, when I am old, will also compile them for my own amusement, to look at the course of my own intellectual growth and development.
In addition, the many essays I am writing now are all composed as the mood takes me, written in one sitting, and they are records of my most genuine thoughts. This is different from the many people nowadays who, at the drop of a hat, become “authors with a shelf full of books.” Those people pile up articles for various other purposes — for example, to qualify for promotion, to pad their performance, to make money, to increase their market value, and so on — and many of those articles are utterly lacking in originality. They take the contents of one book, repeat them with a little added material, and then, in a flash, it becomes another book. That is not a kind of behavior I hope to engage in. I am simply expressing my thoughts truthfully: writing whatever comes to mind, as much as comes to mind, and only for the purposes of self-entertainment and, at most, exchanging ideas with the friends around me. If I were really asked to write a book for publication, then I would need to consider it carefully; it would not be so casual.
December 29, 2005
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Shangling 2009-12-21 13:17:13 [Reply]
I think that by looking at what a person writes, one can tell what level he has reached. I only believe in black-on-white words, the words seen in blank spaces.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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