Recently Entering Reclusion for Writing and Medical Study; Relatives and Friends, Please Do Not Disturb

Dear relatives and friends:

Lately, Zhiyuan has suddenly felt a surging enthusiasm and an unbridled flow of literary inspiration, and can no longer contain himself. He therefore wishes to enter seclusion for a period of writing and medical study. Apart from receiving patients who seek consultation, he will cut off all social activities and will often keep his phone switched off. He asks for your understanding.

Zhiyuan came under the tutelage of his revered teacher, Mr. Li Lixin, twenty years ago. His teacher is a deeply learned Confucian scholar who placed great hopes in Zhiyuan. Eighteen years after graduation, the teacher still from time to time instructs him, and Zhiyuan has benefited immensely. The teacher disciplines his students with a balance of strictness and leniency, of tension and repose. Having absorbed his teacher's bearing for twenty years, Zhiyuan often feels ashamed merely to be counted among his disciples. He wishes to accomplish something worthy in order to repay the teacher's painstaking cultivation and the virtue of his guidance.

Zhiyuan still remembers that twenty years ago, in the classroom, his teacher sighed at the dearth in contemporary Chinese cultural circles of great scholars who united knowledge and action and who mastered both Chinese and Western learning. At the time, Zhiyuan was young and headstrong, unaware of his own limitations, and boldly took it as his own duty to become an unparalleled national scholar worthy of his teacher's expectations.

Twenty years have passed in a flicker. The teacher's temples have turned grey, and Zhiyuan's old dreams have been buried in the trivialities of everyday life; only ruins remain of the idealistic world of his youth. Having neglected his studies and wasted these years, he feels ashamed beyond words when he thinks of it.

Mundane life, with its petty scrambling, has no end, while a human life has a finite term. If one cannot withdraw from the dust of worldly life and from private emotional attachments, one cannot leave behind any work worth leaving.

In recent years Zhiyuan has often reflected on his own faults, repented his errors, questioned human nature, probed directly into the human heart, read and thought, and has gained something from it. Recently, swept by a surging enthusiasm and a flow of inspiration, driven by creative passion, he wishes to write a book that has long remained unwritten—The Real World and the World of Stories—so as not to let his teacher's devoted cultivation go to waste.

Accordingly, Zhiyuan will soon devote himself in his study to writing and medical study, asking nothing of worldly affairs. Only after his work is published will he emerge from seclusion to deal with mundane matters. He hopes that everyone will refrain from disturbing him. Your understanding is sincerely requested!

Written respectfully by the old and worthless Zhou Zhiyuan