This text was not written in a moment of clarity. It began one night, when the body was already fatigued, yet had not given way. I was not seeking to recall anything, nor to endow fatigue with meaning. I simply needed to withdraw briefly, from the order of the day, so that time might once again become perceptible.
Writing unfolds from there—— from the night, from solitude, from a quiet suspension of gazing and response. It then turns, almost without intention, toward childhood and history, experiences that do not return as memory, but surface as structure, shaping perception from within. It comes back to the self, to an earlier point in time, where certain ethical dispositions and sensibilities continue, even now, to construct the path judgment is formed.
Night, Fatigue, and the Right to Withdraw
Tonight I am a bit tired. But it is not the hollow exhaustion that follows collapse; it is a dull ache left in the body after a day that has ended too slowly. There is a faint dryness, a burning at the edge of my eyes, as if they had been exposed to wind for an entire day. I am not complaining; I am merely making an objective record, the way a doctor writes a case report while observing a patient. The strength I spent today has probably exceeded what I am willing to admit, yet my consciousness remains clear, I am still sitting here, and I am still able to press words onto the page—this, for now, is enough.
There is a glass of Armagnac on the table. It lies quietly against the glass, the light slipping down the rim, stretching the line into a kind of silence. I have always liked the sense of order it brings. It is not a mere spirit, not like er guo tou or vodka. It neither makes me forget nor makes me remember; it participates almost not at all in emotion. It is functional, a tool. Its task is simply to cut the day open, like a knife that draws no blood, allowing me to divide time into segments. Daytime belongs to the world of gazing and being gazed, the intersubjective realm where others look at me and I am compelled to look back; the night, once it begins, belongs to me. One sip, and half the door to daytime closes. Another sip, and I may begin to speak in the first person.
What is interesting is that er guo tou and vodka are often regarded by others as “functional alcohols”—drinks for numbing, for escape, for hardening the nerves, for enduring the winter nights. But for me they are precisely notfunctional. They carry too concrete a nostalgia. The moment er guo tou hits, that sharp, peppery assault pressing straight into the nasal cavity, my mind immediately fills with unbecoming scenes: the dust not yet fully swept from the street, the iron doors in the stairwell iced with cold, the crude winter air, the bluish-purple glow of nighttime streetlights. It is a kind of return. Vodka is the same; it bears the steel hardness of the Old World, blunt and without margin, and a single sip summons places that no longer belong to me, yet must be acknowledged as having once belonged. Once they appear, they cease to be the drink of this night; they summon memory, dragging an entire stretch of life to sit across from me. And that is the problem.
I do not want to go back tonight.
I am merely tired. I am not summoning the past, nor attempting to distill from my fatigue any tragic dignity. I do not even wish to grant this tiredness a grand justification. I only want today to remain “today,” so that I may place it properly within the structure of time, rather than mix it into those longer, deeper, more painful layers that can be written into history. Therefore, the Armagnac must draw its own flavor back and give way to its function.
To put it plainly: I do not actually like Armagnac, nor do I particularly favor cognac—this class of spirits regarded in French etiquette as “elegant” carries, for me, too strong a performative quality. They are always held in the hand like a posture, as if the glass itself were a declaration: I am composed, leisurely, a man of refined life. I have a natural distance from this “elegance as spectacle.” It makes me feel as though I am cooperating with a camera rather than living as myself. It is a socially sanctioned form of fatigue—not collapse, not drunkenness, but a kind of “moderate contemplation.” I have no interest in this gesture; I do not wish to prove anything about my place within the fatigue of civilization through a glass of liquor. And yet, it still works. Its advantage lies precisely in this: it has no authority to take me back anywhere. It has no homeland, no front line; it does not, like er guo tou, force me in one mouthful to confront those Beijing corridors I believed I had already walked out of, nor does it, like vodka, call up those winter platforms and those people who could understand each other without speaking. For me, it has no coordinates. And so it can serve as a boundary rather than a passage.
A mouthful of that liquor, and I am not trying to forget anything; I am only seeking a pause. Its heat points neither toward anger nor toward nostalgia. It merely pulls my consciousness back from the public sphere, allowing me to confirm that all those gazes, those expectations, those interpersonal structures that require me to perform as a particular kind of person are waiting outside the door for a moment. And that is what I need tonight—it is not intoxication, not consolation, not even the taste itself, but an ritual that lets me separate the daytime self from the nighttime self. The daytime self is a narrative co-constructed through intersubjectivity: who I am, whom I am responsible to, before whom I must remain clear-headed, firm, and reasonable. The nighttime self only needs to tell the truth to itself; I do not need to prove that I am strong, nor to fabricate that I am tender. My fatigue does not need to be packaged as an aesthetic stance. In other words, er guo tou and vodka would arrive with their entire worlds, and I cannot bear those worlds tonight. What I need tonight is simply time.
The cigarette lies beside me.
I know it is bad for the body—of course I understand that—but I have never felt that I was using smoke as a form of escape. To me it is more like a timer. I light one and wait for it to burn down. I do not explain myself, I do not take a stance, I am not judged. I may sit in silence, even dazed. When the cigarette has burned out, I can return to being a responsible person, someone willing to answer the demands of society. This, to me, is a form of freedom—not pushing the world away, but carving out a piece of time-space that cannot be requisitioned by anyone.
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