A Note from Korewaxnne

This article draws one idea from three seemingly unrelated scenes—my mother embroidering, me copying passages of classical Chinese, and fishing in a game: when people perform repetitive activities, what they gain may be more than the result; it may be the calm that comes from the activity itself. The structure is light, progressing through three layers before arriving at Six Records of a Floating Life and settling on the act of “recording.” If you, too, have ever had a repetitive habit that you could not explain but simply felt compelled to continue, perhaps this article can help you put that feeling into words.

Why did you suddenly feel like embroidering?

(Silence…) I just wanted something to do to pass the time.

I remember seeing you embroider all the time when I was little. Why don’t I see any of it now?

It’s all hanging over there, in the room across the way.

Oh… (Silence.)

My mother and I had this conversation on Tuesday evening. It felt strangely familiar—or rather, her answer reminded me of myself. I watched her then, trying to detect the slightest wavering in the movement of her needle, but her hands remained fluid, without the faintest trace of hesitation.

I asked because I had experienced something similar. In the months before the national college entrance examination, I became captivated by the feeling of copying classical Chinese prose into a notebook. An Account of Wen Yuke’s Painting of the Yundang Valley’s Bent Bamboos and An Account of the Xiangji Studio were my favorites; I copied each of them at least four or five times. I loved the sound that stirred inside me while I wrote. Perhaps it was a flutter of emotion, a sense of recognition—but more than that, it resembled the vague, indescribable feeling I had in my youth when reading, “I would buy osmanthus blossoms and take wine aboard, but it could never be like the journeys of my younger days.”

Yet then, I knew only joy.

After reading a modern translation of Six Records of a Floating Life, I became even more determined to copy the book as my way of reading it. I copied “The Joys of the Wedding Chamber” and “The Little Pleasures of Life” several times. Classical Chinese moves too quickly when I merely read it; copying proceeds at exactly the right pace. Not that I was ever good at Chinese. I could never tune my mind to the same frequency as the teachers who wrote the model answers.

I experienced something similar in Red Dead Redemption 2.

At 5<35>, Arthur takes little Jack fishing, and they have this conversation:

Fishing sure is boring, Uncle Arthur.

Yeah, I know. Boring as hell. But then—something bites. You have food for days.

Really?

If you’re lucky. But until then, you just sit and wait, and try not to think too much. It’s good for you.

It’s good for you?

I guess.

The state of mind behind those words was really the same as my mother’s when she said she was “just passing the time,” and mine when I said, “Yet then, I knew only joy.”

If we were to identify what these three activities have in common, they would share the following qualities:

• They take time without consuming much energy, and their repetition carries a certain rhythm—stitching through predetermined points again and again, waiting repeatedly for a fish to bite, copying one character after another.
• Their results are worth anticipating and may even have lasting benefits—the finished embroidery can be kept and admired again, the fish can provide food for days, and the completed copies can be revisited.
• They usually allow a person to enter a state of flow.

Let us use the opening of Six Records of a Floating Life as our ending.

I was born on the twenty-second day of the eleventh month in winter, in the guiwei year of the Qianlong era. It was an age of peace and prosperity; I was born into a respectable family and lived beside the Canglang Pavilion in Suzhou. Heaven’s generosity toward me could truly be called immense. Dongpo wrote, “Things pass like spring dreams, leaving no trace.” If I failed to preserve them in ink, I could hardly avoid betraying Heaven’s great kindness. I reflected that “Guan Ju” stands at the head of the Three Hundred Odes, and so I placed husband and wife in the first record, with the rest following in order. I am ashamed that I neglected my studies in youth and know little more than the simplest characters. I have done no more than record true feelings and real events. To insist on scrutinizing the grammar would be to demand brightness from a tarnished mirror.

For me, days without recording or copying really do feel as though “things pass like spring dreams, leaving no trace.” So I will make a small record of this feeling.