In the last chapter, I said that written language develops when time and space put limits on direct human communication. I only discussed, however, how space influences this development. In rural society, which is a face-to-face society, people can talk directly to one another and do not need to rely on a written language. But how does separation across time influence the process of human communication?

There are two aspects of this question that we need to discuss. First is the spread of time over a person's lifetime, and the second is the spread of time across generations. Let me begin with the first aspect.

What differentiates human beings from other animals is the extraordinary ability of humans to learn. 1 Most forms of human behavior are not predetermined by innate physiological reactions. What we mean by learning is exactly that process by which human beings, from the time of their birth, reshape their instincts, making them fit man-made behavioral molds. This shaping of behavior is accomplished through"practice." Practice means "training," doing the same thing again and again until a new routine becomes thoroughly ingrained. Therefore, for the individual, learning necessarily breaks down the separation between the past and the present. Human beings have that special ability, which we call "memory," that bridges time. To be sure, animals also have memories, but their memories operate only at a simple physiological level. A white mouse learns which is the shortest route in a maze, but what the mouse learns is merely a new set of physiological reactions. That kind of learning does not depend on a symbolic system. Humans certainly have many habits that are basic to human nature, and in this regard they are like mice running in a maze. But unlike mice, humans are always helped along by their symbolic system of communication, and the most important elements of this system are words. We learn through talking. We abstract the concrete world. We express our reality by a set of concepts that can be applied universally. Such concepts are necessarily expressed through words; by relying on words, we move from the specific to the universal. Concepts create the bridge that joins one event with another. Concepts allow us to move backward into the past as well as forward into the future; concepts allow us to bridge time. From this perspective, animals relate to time in a direct way: stimulus, then response. The human relation to time, however, is mediated through concepts. Words make the world more complex to humans than it is to animals. By simply closing their eyes, humans can envision their past, and from that past, from that accumulation of events and ideas, they can selectively draw out the images needed to interpret the present.

Animals, living instinctively, do not have a problem with time. Their lives form a chain of presents. No one can stop time, just as no knife can cut off the flow of water. But human time differs from animal time. The human present is the total accumulation of the past that is retained through memory. If we lost our memory, our recognition of time would cease.

Humans have such a memory not because their brains operate automatically, like cameras. Humans have the ability to remember, it is true. But they utilize and develop this ability because their present lives must necessarily include ways of doing things that have been transmitted from the past. I already have said that humans learn by incorporating into their behavior preexisting patterns. Only when they have learned these patterns are they able to live in groups. These patterns are not each person's individual creation; they are the legacy of society. The white mouse does not learn from other mice. In order to adapt to its own environment, each mouse has to acquire its own set of experiences through a process of trial and error. Mice are unable to transmit their experiences to other mice; they cannot learn from each other. Humans, however, have the ability to think abstractly and to use complex symbols. They can accumulate not only their own experiences but also those of others. The transmitted patterns are the accumulations of a group's common experiences, which we often refer to by the term culture. Culture is the collective social experience perpetuated by a symbolic system and individual memories. In this way, each person's"present" contains not only the projection of his or her own past but also that of the whole group's past. For individuals, history is not mere ornamentation but the very foundation of life; it is both practical and indispensable. Humans must live in groups; they must learn culture; but to learn culture requires memory, not instincts. Therefore, humans have had to cultivate their ability to remember. They use this ability not only to bridge their own past and present but also to bridge generations, for without this ability there would be neither culture nor the life that we now enjoy.

Perhaps I have said enough on this topic to demonstrate the connection between human life and time. This connection rests upon the ability to use words. It has been said that the language makes the people, and I think this is absolutely correct. The Bible, you will recall, says that when God said something, that something immediately came into existence. 2 Saying is the beginning of being—if not in the material world, certainly in the cultural world. Without a symbolic system, there would be no concepts. And without concepts, there would be no accumulation of human experiences across time. Human life could not go beyond that of animals.

Writing employs symbols that can be recognized by the human eye, but words do not need to be written in order to be symbols. Words can be spoken. Every culture has "words," but not all cultures have a written language. I emphasize this point because I want to show that, generally speaking, rural society is a society without a written language. In the last chapter, I showed that country people do not need to use a written language because they are not separated in space. Now I want to show the same result for their relationship with time.

I just said that we have developed our capacity for memory because our lives require it. Animals, being without culture, manage their lives through instincts, so they have no need for memory. What I have said actually implies something else as well. The requirements for human living determine the level to which our memory actually develops. The world that we encounter at every moment is very complex; we do not take all of it in through our senses. We are selective. Our line of vision moves with the shifting focus of our attention, and our choice of focus depends on the meanings objects have for our livelihood. Those things having no relevance in our lives go unnoticed. Our memory works in the same way. It does not record everything that occurs in the past, but only a small part of it. Actually, it is more accurate to say "recall" than"record." "Record" suggests that we note something in the present for use in the future. "Recall," however, means that we reflect back on our past experience to establish a connection to the present. In fact, it is very difficult to foresee in the present what might be useful in the future. Instead, what we need in the present is constructed selectively by our recalling of the past. This process can sometimes be very hard, as with the so-called painful recall. In any event, our memory is never useless; it is practical, for out of it comes the ability to live as humans.

The range of memory needed by a person living in rural society is not the same as that required for one living in modern cities. Life in rural society is very stable. I have said that people who make their living from the earth cannot readily move. The place of their birth is the place where they grow up and where they die. The most extreme version of this rural model is Laotse's ideal society, where, "although they can hear their neighbors' chickens and dogs, people grow and die without ever visiting their neighbors." 3 In truth, not only do people rarely leave their hometown, but their hometown is usually the same as that of their parents. This is the consequence of being born and dying in the same place. Even though this extreme version of rural society is seldom realized, people often do intend to stay in one place forever. Otherwise, why should people who have died in other places request in their will to have their coffin transported back to their hometown for burial in the family graveyard? 4 They have taken their life from this piece of soil, so after death they want to return their flesh and bones to it.

Because people seldom move, they grow up not only among familiar people but also in familiar places. Staying in the same place for such a long time, the people there seem to intermingle with the earth itself. The experiences of one's ancestors with this familiar patch of earth are passed down and necessarily become one's own experiences. The ages speak as if their lessons were written in stone. These lessons surround ensuing generations and are repeated endlessly, so that each person's experiences are the same as every other person's. It is like a play repeated on the stage; actors need only to remember the same set of lines. Each person's individual experience equals that of the entire generation. There is no need to accumulate experience, only to preserve it as it is.

I remember that, when I was in elementary school, a teacher forced us to keep a diary. Although I took great pains to think about what I did, it seemed, after a while, that I only wrote the same line: "The same as above." And that was true, too. Every day my life was the same. Get up in the morning, go to school, play, and go to sleep at night. What else could I write? When the teacher forbade all the students to write "The same as above," we had to make up lies.

When the patterns of life are fixed on physiological habits, our existence takes on a working rhythm: "Wake with the sun and rest with the dusk." Memory becomes superfluous. The saying "We act as if we never know that old age is coming" (bu zhi lao zhi jiang zhi) describes a life in which we forget time. The fall of the Qin, the rise of the Han—what difference does it make? 5 People in rural society do not fear forgetfulness. They are even quite comfortable with it.

Only when we want to remember to do something outside our normal routine do we tie a knot around our finger. That string on our finger is a primitive form of written language. Such a language serves to assist human memory by means of external symbols that create an association among ideas. In a frequently changing environment, we sense that our memory may be inadequate, and so we need to use external symbols. At this point, language is transformed from a spoken language into a written language, from communication based on sounds to one based on words. Language becomes the ability to use a rope to tie knots, a knife to carve ideograms, a brush to write characters—all of which necessarily occur when our lives are changed from a fixed to an ever-changing existence. People who live in cities and see strange faces day in and day out need to keep an address book in their pockets. In rural society, even an identification card bearing a photograph is totally meaningless. There may be over a dozen "elder brother Wangs" in a village, but nobody would mistake one for another.

In a society where the life of each generation appears before us like a movie played over and over again, history is simply unnecessary. What is past is only a legend. Whenever people account for the origins of things, they begin with the same phrase, "When heaven separated from the earth." They have to begin, with a bang, at the exciting starting point, because what follows will be only ordinary things like those at present. In urban society, there is news; but in rural society, news is something strange and absurd. In urban society, there are celebrities; but in rural society, as the saying goes, "People fear becoming famous just as pigs fear becoming fat." 6 No one should lead, no one should follow. Everyone should be the same, and everyone should follow the same path. People in this kind of society do not distribute themselves in the form of a normal curve. Instead, all of them act as if they are made out of the same mold.

In this kind of society, a spoken language is sufficient to pass experience between generations. When a person has a problem, he or she is certain to get an effective solution from someone older. People all live in the same environment. They all walk along the same path, but some walk there earlier than others do. The ones who come later step into the footprints of those who walked earlier. Experience of this sort can be passed from mouth to mouth without anything being lost. So where is the need for a written language? Time provides no obstacle; one thing closely follows another. An entire culture can be passed between fathers and sons without any omissions.

This being the case, if China is a rural society, how could a written language have come into existence in the first place? My answer is that, although the foundation of Chinese society is certainly rural, Chinese writing itself did not develop in rural society. The earliest characters had a religious quality to them and were used in temples; those characters, even down to the present time, have never belonged to the people in the countryside. Our written language emerged in a different setting. In this chapter, all that I want to point out is that, at the most basic level, at the rural level, there is spoken language but no genuine use for a written language. If we consider the spatial and temporal qualities of rural life, we must conclude that country people live their lives in face-to-face intimacy and with repetitious and rigid life patterns. Rural people are certainly not too stupid to learn characters. Instead, they have no need for characters to assist them, because a written language does not help them with the necessities of living in rural society. If China's rural foundations were to change, then—and perhaps only then—literacy would come to the countryside. 1zjdfLmdJcbsQD0hfpQnEADhMHeAVoeZRoRrzrlkPW1BB4kFPkb65m7qojoY9wBs