Night Reading Notes (A Self-Compiled Collection by Zhou Zuoren)

Author: Zhou Zuoren, edited by Zhi'an
Publisher:
Publishing Date: June 1, 2003
Features: In my childhood, while studying classical Chinese, I came across the line from "The Ode to Autumn Sounds" by Ou Yangxiu: "Ou Yangzi was reading at night," and it often led me into fantasies. I imagined a scene with a thatched roof, paper windows, a candle stand, and a teacup, with bamboo and coconut palms outside. Later, though I came across the line "A woman's fragrance adds to the night of reading," it also had its charm, yet it could not change my initial imagination. When my father was alive, he lived in our old family home and often talked about his wish to have a small tower, quiet and secluded, where he could study. However, my father was always melancholic and unsuccessful, as predicted by fortune-tellers: "His nature was high, but his fate was thin as paper." Shortly after reaching his life expectancy, he suddenly passed away due to a chronic illness. The sickroom became even more cramped, with just a three-foot courtyard outside. The ideal study room that he spoke of remained only as an image in my heart.
At the age of eleven, I first read "The Doctrine of the Mean," and over the next seven or eight years, I failed to learn calligraphy properly and could hardly write a satisfactory essay. The following year, in 1900, I went to Nanjing to serve as a naval soldier on a government scholarship, using my monthly allowance for daily expenses. However, the five years of training proved useless, and the only things I remember now are how to fire a gun and climb masts. Later, under the order of the Jiangnan Military Training Office, I was sent to Japan to study architecture. I learned to "build houses" but ultimately failed to complete it. I then turned to studying ancient Greek to translate the "New Testament," though this project was never carried out—even though it cannot be blamed on me. Later, I realized that the official translation was already suitable and there was no need to rewrite it in archaic style.
Thus, I never acquired a specialized field of study or profession and spent twenty years doing odd jobs. Like my father said, I still haven’t built that ideal study room, though it exists only in my daydreams and nighttime fantasies, making me often long for and yearn for nighttime reading. I often ask myself: Can someone like me truly be considered a reader? This might be debatable. In a narrow sense, a reader should be a scholar, and I am certainly not. Broadly speaking, anyone holding a book to read, compared to those who do not, is a reader, so perhaps I can say that at times I was reading. As for nighttime reading, that is really not true, because in my opinion, nighttime reading must be associated with a study room. How could we poor and busy people afford such a privilege? We could only find time to read whenever possible. If there was still time after reading, I would jot down a few notes, with no other intention except to avoid letting my thoughts vanish easily. I wanted to leave some trace behind, so I wrote a few lines. Because I found nighttime reading interesting, I titled it "Notes on Night Reading." In reality, as mentioned earlier, I was not reading at night, yet I still claimed to be a nighttime reader. There is no other reason for this—only my deep love and longing for nighttime reading.
January 3, 1928, in Beijing.