Months have passed, and I still haven't been able to write the final chapter of this series. About Lu Yao, it seems I still have much to say — yet what more can I say?
I think that in Lu Yao's life, in many people's lives — including my own — we all once believed we held fast to something with unwavering conviction. We thought that was our pure, white ideal. But on life's expedition, which is forever a departure from ourselves, we will never again encounter that pure, white ideal.
For Lu Yao, that pure, white ideal was literature.
On the long march from "Wang Weiguo" to "Lu Yao," he didn't merely fail to reunite with pure, white literature — one could say he never truly saw it at all. For Lu Yao, literature was deeply stained from the very beginning by the deprivation he was born into, and by the hunger for fame and fortune that deprivation nourished.
Just like the first time he saw that female zhiqing from Beijing.
Of course, it was there — that innocent tremor. It was the tremor of the uncivilized before the civilized, the village troublemaker before the city girl. But in the very instant that tremor arose, calculation and snobbery were already spreading through his heart.
When he ardently pursued the Beijing zhiqing, there was certainly a human connection in it — love and desire — but at the same time, it was also his campaign to change his fate.
These two motives were so tangled together that even Lu Yao himself probably couldn't tell them apart.
Similarly, through literature he built a spiritual connection with hundreds of millions of readers, but also, through literature, a connection with a destiny of distinction and success.
This is the fate of people like us: everything we believe in has been stained by various karmic forces in this world. Or rather, those things were always constituted by the convergence of infinite karmic forces to begin with.
Among all people there is one type — Lu Yao's type — who spend their entire lives passing off the false as the true, striving to transform the false into the true. He loathed the specks of mud on himself; he tried to build a pure world through literature, to negate the self that was born from deprivation and full of calculation. This is cruel, and it is heroic.
But he never considered that the false things were equally real, and the real things might well be false. The utilitarianism and snobbery on him, that extreme craving to change his fate and escape deprivation, along with the vanity and pretense that came with it — these were the truest spiritual colors of a generation of Chinese people, and the fundamental reason his literature could move hearts.
He wrote that falseness — but that falseness truly existed in every person and deep within the national psyche. And so that falseness was, in fact, true.
The purity we can encounter will always be the purity that exists within our lives — not that ideal, flawless purity, which is false precisely because it does not exist. No lotus grows without rising from the mud. No ideal is anything other than pure and white.
Every path we walk — so long as it is sincere, a path toward becoming ourselves — is ultimately pure and white, even if that purity grows from the mud.
(End)