This WeChat official account has been running for eight years now.
It may well be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
Though it has fewer than three hundred followers, and each article only gets views in the double digits,
popularity was never the goal.
Looking back at the very first “Prologue,” it actually holds up quite well:
to go beyond mere repetition, to distinguish order from chaos.
And in hindsight, it has largely lived up to that.
I cannot imagine how I would recall the past without these hundreds of pieces.
Many subtle and delicate emotions would have vanished forever,
like a spring dream leaving no trace.
These writings have marked the passage of time.
Along the way, I do feel myself becoming stronger.
As though Achilles’ mother had washed him in the waters of the Styx,
I too have been tempering my own heart,
forging it to grow stronger.
Yet my very idea of strength has changed.
In the past, I thought strength meant a heart of stone—
someone unshaken, untouched, and immune to inner turmoil.
But I no longer think this way.
Now, a line from Vagabond speaks closer to my heart:
“All the strong are gentle.”
Only the truly foolish cling stubbornly to exclusion,
priding themselves on never being “broken.”
It is only the truly strong who can stand firmly on the earth,
embracing everything with vast magnanimity,
understanding the suffering and struggles of others,
and soothing the human heart.
This account is called Zheng Shiqi(正十七), referring to the regular heptadecagon, a name taken from the novel * Yingxiong Zhi.*
It means squaring the circle: the perfect circle belongs to the realm of the divine, while mortals can only transform circle into square, approaching it step by step.
I can see that, in the past, God for me dwelled high above, in the heavens. What I sought then was truth at the very limits of knowledge—the hidden reality behind the world, the sun beyond Plato’s cave.
Back then, what we longed for was God’s omniscience—the ultimate form of human reason, a symbol of mankind’s pursuit of truth.
But now, for me, God dwells among humans, by our side. Even if human reason were pushed to its limits, it could never answer the question: “What ought one to do?”
It is no longer omniscience or omnipotence that I find most unattainable, but God’s omnibenevolence. For once you understand the limits of your ability, the things you long for yet cannot achieve no longer wound you—you have done your best. What truly cuts deep is regret: the remorse for what could have been done but was left undone.
This is the curse of freedom.
And in my eyes, omnibenevolence means the perfect use of this human freedom.
As for what to write in the future,
I’ve wondered whether to shift toward more popular topics.
After all, writing with few readers can indeed feel discouraging at times.
My strength lies in cognition.
Not that I produce endless new insights in any one field,
but that I can sift through the flood of noise and recognize what is truly valuable.
So, if I were to write something of public use,
perhaps the most worthwhile would be popular science—
curating and filtering knowledge.
But I rarely feel like doing it.
I only write such things when I’ve argued with someone
and need to set the record straight.
I write only about what matters to me. But what matters to me is seldom fashionable, so it may never become popular. So be it. I’ll treat it as play, nothing more.
Better to be neither beautiful nor popular than to lose sincerity and originality.
The next guiding thread of my life is this: to conquer fear.
If I fear writing with emotion, then I will write more of it—laying that weakness bare.
If I feel I have never been cool, then I will try to become cooler.
If I am always afraid of rejection, then I will keep facing it until I am desensitized.