Today is already the last day of 2009. Opening up my Google Docs, the blog text for the year has reached sixty thousand words — needless to say, I’ve produced a lot of internet garbage, piled up the past, but it also feels like returning to a few years ago, lying awake at night watching documentaries, jotting down moving moments from the African savanna, moved to tears by the humanity they portrayed. Now I’ve gone back to what people call “ethics films” (lunlipian), though watching that kind of film is actually quite uncomfortable. In high school, because of my age, there was a lot I couldn’t grasp; now it’s the opposite — still shallow, but a further analysis of people is taking place, through a method of “empathy,” though only directed at characters in films.

I say uncomfortable because it requires putting yourself in the characters’ shoes — one moment you’re a wronged wife tormented by a third party, the next a petulant, resentful young hothead, then a gay man doubting his own sexual orientation, then a family member suffering through the agony of death… Gradually, in the process of empathizing, your own emotional world gets stripped away, and you become the troubled teenager, the homosexual, the necrophiliac, the lonely old widow. Until you can no longer distinguish honor from disgrace, right from wrong — just like a “receptor,” responding to whatever command comes in, all sorts of responses, even those concerning life and death. So gradually I came to understand the helplessness and pain of a psychoanalyst — everything is so limited. At a dinner someone asked me, what exactly counts as an “ethics film”? I was momentarily speechless, and gave a hasty answer that it’s defined by the director — actually the very label “ethics film” is wrong to begin with, because what we call “ethics” is far too small next to the conflicts of emotion.

What strikes my heart the most is the thing talked about most — emptiness and bewilderment — and it sweeps in like a tidal wave. Why do people choose busyness, why do they choose loneliness — I don’t know if there’s some collective unconscious or social issue behind it. What I do understand is that emptiness and bewilderment have wedged themselves into the cracks of my busy life as a math major, like a rationalist poet running into a drifting, lonely vagrant in the midst of life — simply incompatible, foreign to one another. But the more you refuse to admit that these small emotions have taken hold of your heart, the more they really do slip away quietly like a black cat in the night, replaced once again by calculation and proof.

What troubles me most of all is still my studies. I’ve reached the tail end of these sixteen years of formal education, and I can now openly browse books like Erotic Songs Through the Ages (Liu Qi, 2005) or Twenty Lectures on Sex and Love (Li Yinhe, 2008) on the library’s second-floor book cart, without the embarrassment I felt in high school. So this year I’ve dabbled in a fair amount — sexology, literature, linguistics, religious studies, divination, psychology, philosophy… But there are two difficulties. First, it’s hard to read a book all the way through from start to finish — I always pick something up in high spirits, devour an afternoon’s worth, then put it down, and by the time I pick it up again a couple days later the enthusiasm has already faded. So every book ends up only partly read — at most a few hundred pages, at least a few dozen — not great. Second, further reading is hard — for closely related disciplines like psychology and philosophy it’s manageable, but it’s hard to juggle the rest, and once I stop, picking it back up means starting from scratch, and on top of that my disobedient eyes keep wandering off, so everything gets even harder. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

How much of the objective and subjective can the human brain really face, how many contradictions can it untangle? Faced with this fragmented world, will someone really come and deconstruct it for me? I don’t want to keep starting and stopping like this — I want to find some stability, to live it out faithfully from beginning to end, quietly, until death. I don’t know whether everything will keep going in 2010 — continuing to manage a life that never gets managed well; continuing to prove math problems that take so much effort; continuing to watch, on and off, restricted films and documentaries; and in the end, will I be able to answer the question that troubles me most: people rush about, but toward what?

Confucius said: study the old to understand the new. Since that’s so, let this piece serve as a summary of 2009 and a preface to 2010. I hope next year won’t turn out the way Twelve Monkeys (1996) put it: the future is history. But to look at it pessimistically, the present is already history.