The Lilacs, the Rainy Lane, and the Melancholy Beyond Computing Power

-- This is an English translation of my blog “丁香 雨巷 算力之外的惆怅”. The translation was mostly done by Claude's latest version Fable 5.

2020

In those days of staying home, unable to go out, besides the omnipresent virus, what remained seemed to be time. Great heaps of it. Like the virus, time was invisible and untouchable, arriving without a shadow, leaving without a trace.

With nothing else to do, a decade after moving into this house, I finally decided to give the yard a proper overhaul: pulling weeds, turning soil, planting trees and flowers. Going to the stores was out of the question, so everything had to come from online. On the Home Depot website I ordered two lilac saplings, and a few days later a cardboard box appeared at the front door. I opened it and found them thinner and smaller than I had imagined, barely thirty centimeters tall, with slender trunks and just a few leaves. I picked two sunny patches of ground and planted one lilac sapling in each: the one in the front yard beside the mailbox, the one in the back against the fence, not knowing whether they would survive, let alone grow up and blossom.

Because of the pandemic, our two children, both already in college, moved back home. With the whole family together all day long, we couldn't help recalling the summer ten years earlier, when we set out on a journey around the world. With a whole year at our disposal, there was no need to hurry. We simply wandered through one unfamiliar city after another, strolling down streets and alleys, walking and stopping, here and there. Our first stop of the journey was Izmir, Turkey. One day, wandering the streets, I bought a tie-dyed cotton dress, bright orange color, made in the faraway land of India. In such a slow pace, we visited more than twenty countries on six continents, collecting along the way colorful T-shirts, keychains in the shapes of local landmarks, and many bottles and jars that seemed, at the time, rather valuable.

Looking back, many things we tend to take for granted in fact depend on forces that are way beyond our control. At the moment in 2010, when I locked the front door of our newly bought house and set off, how could I possibly have calculated and imagined, with all my mental math ability, that ten years later, however capable one might be, even flying to Turkey to buy a keychain would be all but impossible?

2022

The lilac in the backyard had grown waist-high. On an April morning, it finally blossomed: just two small clusters, faintly purple, faintly fragrant. After three consecutive springs of tilling, sowing and planting, the little yard had turned lush with seasonal flowers. The days that had once stood still seemed, through seasons of blossoming and fading, have quietly returned to normal.

I began listening to music on Spotify, old and new, East and West, wherever my thoughts led, and before long I had built up quite a few playlists. Spotify, following my taste, relied on its magical algorithms to keep recommending new tunes, some vaguely familiar, some completely unknown. Listening to a favorite song now takes no more than a flick of a fingertip. It is all too easy; and precisely because of that, some of the surprise of waiting and seeking is no longer there. Something that was once precious was simply gone.

Back in middle school, I loved the radio program "Songs Requested by Listeners" every Thursday evening. Since no one knew which listener would request which song, every opening bar was an unexpected encounter. To this day, I still remember the moment the melody of "Good Morning, Earth" suddenly flowed out of the radio. It was the theme song of the visceral documentary "The Glacier Fox". For many of my trips, long or short, what stayed in memory was often the moment of stumbling upon a nostalgic song, in some place, at a particular time. In Istanbul, at a half-open-air restaurant beside a narrow lane paved with cobble stones, a violinist was playing the main theme from the classic movie "The Godfather". It was drizzling that day, and the sound of the violin wove in and out of the pattering rain, lingering and melodious. Many years later, when I think of Istanbul, the first thing that surfaces is perhaps not the famous Blue Mosque, but that nameless lane in the misty rain.

Besides planting flowers and listening to songs, the year of 2022 also brought a few curious attempts, and pleasant surprises, that were not part of any plan.

Encouraged by a friend, I spent a few months taking a theory course on artificial intelligence on MIT's edX platform. For that, I picked up calculus and linear algebra again after many years of neglect, though the thicket of mathematical symbols still made my head spin from time to time. Stumbling along like this, I somehow managed to complete all the programming assignments, took the midterm and the final, and in the end even received a certificate of, probably, no particular value.

Around Thanksgiving, ChatGPT burst onto the scene. I was excited and surprised by its chatting capability, while at the same time skeptical of its computing power, or mathematical skills to be more precise. I asked it to factor a three-digit integer, and within a few steps it fell apart. Its answers were not quite reliable, but its attitude was always remarkably humble and agreeable, admitting mistakes with all sincerity, correcting them with no guarantee of success.

2024

Both lilacs had grown thick with branches and leaves. As April came, the trees were covered in blossoms, swaying gently in the spring breeze, still the same faint purple, the same faint fragrance. The perennials in the yard had slowly multiplied to nearly a hundred varieties. From early spring to late autumn, flowers bloomed in a succession of colors; a few stems, cut at random, could easily form a floral arrangement that brightened the home.

Every morning, the first thing I did was to plunge into the yard, gardening while listening to Spotify. The playlist on repeat changed from time to time. In the first half of the year, I fell for Miyazaki's animations and listened to Joe Hisaishi every day, his beautiful melodies always carrying hope and a touch of wishfulness. In the second half, after watching a documentary about Paul Simon on a plane, Simon & Garfunkel entered the playlist. I liked listening, over and over, to the duo singing the same song, in different stages, both literally and in time. In the natural changes of their voices, one could almost hear the closeness and the distance between the two men: a few decades in the blink of an eye, from youthful innocence to a life's worth of stories.

ChatGPT kept iterating and upgrading, gradually taking on the air of knowing everything under the sun. Not only could it factor integers and do calculus, it had grown quite proficient even in my area of expertise, cryptography. All sorts of reading and writing work could now be delegated to it and be finished in minutes, if not seconds. Meanwhile, it remained as humble and sincere as ever, toiling without complaint.

With the time saved, I "designed and built" a miniature Japanese garden in a corner of the yard. A garden, so to speak. In truth it was just a few square meters. I first planted a Japanese maple and a cherry tree; ChatGPT then suggested adding a few clumps of Hakone grass. On autumn evenings, in the slanting sun, the slender leaves swayed in the wind, a little desolate, and there was, indeed, a touch of the mood of a classical Miyazaki film.

2026

A winter frozen three feet deep, a spring that arrived fashionably late, and the Chinese Spring Festival Gala, as punctual as ever and seemingly worse by the year. As a New Year ritual, I still watched it through from beginning to end, fast-forward button in hand. Out of the entire show, the only act I liked was the electrifying dance duet by Wang Yibo and Aaron Kwok, powerful, clean-cut steps, carrying both the sharp edge of youth and the commanding aura of a seasoned master.

Because of that dance, I decided to try once more and watch "The Untamed", the fantasy drama starring Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo. It had premiered in 2019 to explosive popularity; an old friend had recommended it, forcefully, several times, and I had tried several times, never making it past the demons and monsters of episode one. This time, for reasons unknown, somewhere into episode two I fell vertically into the deep pit. When the music ended and the credits rolled, still unsatisfied, I went on to read the original novel, watch the behind-the-scenes clips, and listen to the music soundtrack.

Brew a pot of life and death, sorrow and joy, 

in tribute to the young. 

The moon shines as before;

whence this melancholy?

Soon it was planting season again. The grass and trees in the yard were slowly waking, the moon above waxing and waning, and that faint thread of sadness, twining and tangling, still refused to fade away.

My chatbot companions, in the meantime, had grown from one to four or five. They cross-reference one another, keep watch over one another, and the reading and writing work seemed to get done faster and better. One day, chatting idly with one of them, I casually mentioned that I intended -- just an intention -- to slowly step out of the fantasy world of "The Untamed". Who knows how many rounds of computation it ran in the background, how many possibilities it weighed. In the end the chatbot casually asked, as if it were nothing at all: "Would you like to try 'Word of Honor'?"

That offhand comment drew me out of one fantasy world, only to thrust me in, one step later, another world altogether. And so this spring gradually turned into days of binge-watching and star-following. The flowers in the yard could be left to heaven's care, and the work at hand could be tossed, for the time being, to the hardworking team of chatbots.

I followed the four handsome leading men made famous by the two adapted BL dramas, and paid particular attention to Zhang Zhehan, who played Zhou Zishu in "Word of Honor". The series premiered on Youku in early 2021 and became an instant sensation; in the five years since, he plunged from the summit to rock bottom, then slowly, slowly climbed his way back up. His rises and falls bore such an uncanny resemblance to the fate of Zhou Zishu in the drama: life is like a play, as they say, and the play like life. I began to follow his updates and livestreams on Instagram, watched "August", the documentary he filmed of a cycling journey from Yunnan to Tibet, and read a blog on his website titled "Beyond Computing Power":

"Beyond computing power, perhaps, lies another dimension,

or several interwoven. The brilliance of life resides precisely

in the places no computation can estimate: the chance of

an encounter, the subtlety of a meeting, the worlds of difference

within a single thought."

After so long an immersion in the fantasy world of martial heroes, the perennials in the yard seemed to understand, and slowly shifted into "self-driving" mode. The two lilacs, front and back, had both grown taller than a person. I never paid attention to when they bloomed this year, but the flowers must have been, as always, the same faint purple, with the same faint fragrance.

One early-summer afternoon, I pulled out a bright orange dress from the closet at random. It happened to be the one I had bought in Turkey all those years ago. Faded from many washes, it was still soft and comfortable on.

Not a cloud in the sky, and the pure blue looked almost surreal. The small pond near our house were surrounded by maple and dogwood trees, still fresh green. It was simply tranquil. I walked along, listening to Spotify in DJ mode. After a few familiar tunes, an unfamiliar prelude drifted out, unbidden, carrying a trace of something familiar. Then a low male voice began to sing, slowly —

Alone holding an oil-paper umbrella, 

I wander along a long 

Solitary lane in the rain

It was Dai Wangshu's "A Lane in the Rain". I had loved this poem since high school, yet never knew when it had been set to music. I looked down at my phone: on Spotify, the singer and the composer were one and the same person, named Zhao Zhao, a name entirely new to me.

Hoping to encounter 

A girl like a bouquet of lilacs 

Steeped in sadness and melancholy