Loneliness Has Been the Main Theme of My Life

Since high school, loneliness has been the main theme of my life.

I write furiously in solitude, I bury myself in books in solitude, I quietly observe the world in solitude, I think silently in solitude—I have grown accustomed to living in solitude.

Perhaps this is also a family tradition. Almost all of my cousins share one obvious trait: they are extremely lively as children, but suddenly, one day, they fall silent.

Once we reach the age of reason, nearly every one of us stops talking, let alone making friends. Whether some biological hereditary factor is at work, I do not know. But it is a plain fact that my family truly has this tradition. It is perhaps most obvious in the children of my fourth uncle.

I do not know what my brothers and sisters rely on to express their inner feelings. It seems I am the only one who likes to write. In writing, I have conversed with myself for decades, and I do not feel lonely.

Of course, we are only solitary, not withdrawn. Every one of us has the ability to socialize, yet we all choose not to.

I am extremely cautious about choosing whom to befriend—so much so that I make perhaps one friend per decade. In forty years, I have made only three or four friends, and one of them has long been in his grave.

And even this so-called friendship amounts to no more than mutual recognition within the heart; we meet once or twice a year, each meeting lasting only an hour or two.

As for my elder brother, apart from me, his younger brother, he probably has only one or two friends as well.

Although we are polite and can converse with people—even wittily and humorously—and get along well with neighbors and relatives in daily life, asking us to take someone on as a friend simply will not happen. Of course, behind closed doors, family life is lively enough.

I recall that Master Hsing Yun of Taiwan once said that in his whole life he had never grown close to anyone, nor had anyone grown close to him. I am probably in much the same state.

Human beings are social animals, yet if a person becomes too social, something seems off. Compared with a room full of guests, I prefer solitude.

For me, loneliness is not merely a good medicine; it is, like food and water, a daily necessity for survival, indispensable for a single day. It is hard to imagine that someone like me was once the social star of the entire school.

More than twenty years have passed since I chose solitude at the end of my first year of high school, and I increasingly enjoy it. I dislike being disturbed, and I dislike disturbing anyone else.

There are always people who eagerly hope to befriend me and who try to define me according to their own way of thinking, but all such people run up against a wall with me.

If I must speak at length, it can only be for work, not for friendship.

The way I communicate with the world is through reading and writing. I read others, and others read me—that is all.

Occasionally there is an exception, and that almost always arises during real-life contact, when two people take a liking to each other and chat a little longer.

Even with some of my old classmates, I dislike taking their calls. Once the pleasantries exceed ten sentences, I desperately want to end the conversation. It is nothing but empty, pretentious boilerplate—why waste time on it?

The biggest problem in my life may be that I have rather too many readers. In the past I solved this by frequently changing pen names; once a pen name gained a little fame, I would switch to another and start over. Now I write under my real name, and I truly do not know whether, ten or twenty years from now, I will be pestered beyond endurance because of it.

I have used many pen names and produced tens of millions of words of literary rubbish on the Internet. Occasionally I recall a pen name I once used, Baidu my old writings, and find that people are still forwarding or plagiarizing my old articles; I then smile to myself.

Others play at life, while I play for a while in the ocean of words, merely to relieve the loneliness of existence. These writings truly reflect the course of my own growth. The old self is dead, and the new self will soon become an old self and die in turn. What I do not cling to is not only my own bodily frame, but also my own words and thoughts.

I cannot remember which writer had a habit: he would put his manuscripts away in a cabinet for three years, then take them out and read them again. If he could bear to read them, he would publish them; if he could not, he would burn them.

I think this is a fine habit. Following his practice, I fear there would be very little I could salvage from my old writings today.

My earlier articles were more literary than my current ones; looking at them now, I find them sentimental and affected. Nowadays I prefer to write in plain language, striving for simplicity and unadornedness. This is a kind of negation of the past. Whether the future will negate the present, who can say?

A solitary writer who chooses solitude and enjoys it does not care whether the world understands him, nor whether what he writes will endure. Therefore, clinging to the old self is, for someone like me who has walked alone in solitude for so many years, unimaginable.

Loneliness is life's greatest subtraction. Once a person takes bitter pleasure in solitude, the world can do nothing with him.

I like to steer my own life myself; I dislike the outside world steering it for me. Therefore, choosing loneliness as the main theme of my life was the single most correct thing I have ever done.

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