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comrades-in-arms. With a few other necessary associates about us, and after some discussion, we decided to begin by publishing a magazine. Since, back then, most of our compatriots had their faces still turned to the past, we were determined to take the forward-looking title
New Life
.
    But as publication approached, first those who had pledged to write for us, and then our capital, melted away, leaving only three of us, without a penny to our names. After such inauspicious beginnings, no one had any sympathy for us. Later still, fate scattered us three survivors too far from one another to meet to discuss our marvellous dreams for the future. And that is how our
New Life
ended in stillbirth.
    The experience filled me with entirely novel feelings of futility and failure. In the immediate aftermath of it all, I could not explain why things had worked out in this way. But as time went on, I came to think that a lone individual will be encouraged by support, and stimulated to struggle by criticism. But indifference – being left to shout into an abyss – generates something else: a peculiarly hollow sense of desolation. It was then I began to feel lonely.
    My loneliness grew with every day that passed, coiling itself like a great poisonous snake around my soul.
    And though I was unreasonable enough to feel the sorrow of it, I couldn’t stir myself to anger. Because the Tokyo fiasco forced me to reflect realistically on myself: that I was no hero, no demagogue capable of rousing the masses with a single battle-cry.
    But I had to do something about the loneliness, because it was causing me too much pain. So I tried all manner of opiates: attempting to merge into the massed ranks of my fellow countrymen, immersing myself in study of the classics. Later still, I experienced or witnessed things that intensified my feelings of loneliness and sorrow – things that I preferred not to remember, that I preferred to bury (alongside my head) deep in the sand. But my quest for intellectual narcotics had had some effect; I had succeeded in ridding myself of my youthful ideals.
    There was a three-room apartment in the Shaoxing Hostel in Beijing. The story went that a woman had once hanged herself on the locust tree in the courtyard outside. Even though the tree later grew so tall no one could reach its branches, still the apartment remained unoccupied. For years, then, this was where I lodged, copying out ancient stone inscriptions. I suffered very few visitors, and applied myself to realizing my sole ambition: to permit my life to ebb quietly away, without undue stimulation – either technical or intellectual – from my inscriptions. On summer nights, when mosquitoes hung heavy in the air, I would sit beneath the locust tree, cooling myself with a cattail-leaf fan, glimpsing scraps of blue sky through cracksin the dense foliage overhead, as nocturnal caterpillars dropped icily on to my neck.
    An occasional visitor was an old friend by the name of Jin Xinyi. 3 Setting his large leather briefcase on a battered old table, he would take off his gown and sit himself down opposite me, looking as if his heart was still pounding from fear of a dog he had encountered along the way.
    ‘What’s the use in this?’ he asked one evening, flicking through my book of inscriptions.
    ‘None at all.’
    ‘Why are you doing it, then?’
    ‘No reason.’
    ‘I thought, maybe you could write something for…’
    I knew what he was driving at. Although he and a few associates were now working on a magazine of their own –
New Youth
4 – so far they had been rewarded only by indifference, by neither criticism nor support. Maybe, I thought, they were feeling lonely. This is what I replied:
    ‘Imagine an iron house: without windows or doors, utterly indestructible, and full of sound sleepers – all about to suffocate to death. Let them die in their sleep, and they will feel nothing. Is it right to cry out, to rouse the light sleepers among them, causing