我吃了四颗褪黑素，到了早上六点依然没有睡着。

天快亮的时候，脑子反而格外清楚，像一间刚被人打扫过的空屋子。睡前读的《黑客与画家》还摊在枕边，Paul Graham 在书里反复绕着同一个问题转：一个人应该如何在一个高度制度化、专业化的世界里，保留独立思考和自由创造的能力？

凌晨四点，我想到第一件事：今天的程序员管面试题叫「八股文」。背操作系统八股、背网络八股、背设计模式八股。这个词用得那样自然，好像没有人觉得奇怪。可它明明是五百多年前的东西。

凌晨五点，我想到第二件事：《笑傲江湖》。我很早就读过这部小说，那时只记得独孤九剑、令狐冲喝酒、任盈盈弹琴。直到这个失眠的早上，我才忽然意识到，金庸写的根本不是武林，而是制度。

于是这篇文章就有了名字：新八股与笑傲江湖。

谈八股，很容易一上来就骂。但我想先替它说几句公道话，因为不把它的好处说清楚，就看不懂它的坏处是怎么长出来的。

科举在它诞生的年代，是一项了不起的发明。在它之前，做官靠门第、靠举荐、靠认识谁；科举第一次让一个寒门子弟有可能凭一张卷子改变命运。而八股文，说到底是一套评分标准：破题、承题、起讲、入题，再接起股、中股、后股、束股，每一部分写什么、怎么对仗，都有规矩。

为什么要这么死板？因为全国成千上万的考生、几百个考官，要想公平地比较，就必须把文章变成可以比较的东西。标准化是公平的代价。

问题在于，标准化有它自己的引力。

一开始，格式是为了方便评判内容；后来，格式本身就成了内容。八股文要求「代圣人立言」——你必须以孔孟的口吻说话，不许说自己的话。到了明清，一个读书人可以把四书章句背得滚瓜烂熟，把八股写得工整漂亮，却一辈子没有说过一句属于自己的话。

顾炎武在《日知录》里说过一句极重的话：

但很少有人注意到，他这句话骂的其实不是八股这种文体，而是「拟题」：考生不读经书，只背预先押好的题目和范文，靠抄袭、靠请人代笔应付考试，到头来问到没押中的经书，竟茫然不知是什么书。顾炎武说，今日科场之病，没有比拟题更严重的了。

请记住这个细节。它会在下一节出现。

还要注意一点：八股之所以能「坑」人，不是因为它压迫你，而是因为它奖励你。你写得越像，得分越高；你越不像你自己，越能出人头地。一套制度最厉害的地方，从来不是它禁止了什么，而是它奖励了什么。

我们并没有走出八股，只是换了题目。

程序员的面试八股是最直白的例子。一个人可能从没真正设计过一个系统，却能对答如流地背出 TCP 三次握手、HashMap 扩容、Redis 持久化。面试官问的是标准问题，候选人给的是标准答案，双方心照不宣。

这不就是顾炎武骂的「拟题」吗？三百多年过去，连病名都没换。

学术界也有自己的八股。一篇论文的引言怎么写、相关工作怎么列、实验表格怎么排、在哪个数据集上比基线高零点几个点，都有不成文的格式。一个研究生可能很快学会了写出「像论文的论文」，却越来越难回答一个简单的问题：你真正想弄明白的到底是什么？

再往外看：简历有简历的八股，述职有述职的八股，连公众号都有爆款八股。

新八股和旧八股的结构一模一样：

1. 一套为了公平比较而建立的标准；
2. 标准慢慢从手段变成目的；
3. 制度开始奖励那些最像标准的人，而不是最好的人。

所以，「独立思考」在今天真正的难处，不是有没有勇气说不同的话，而是：当你最像别人的时候，恰恰是你被奖励得最多的时候。

这种处境，金庸早就写过一个最完美的人物。

《笑傲江湖》里的岳不群，外号「君子剑」。

他是华山派掌门，温文尔雅，处处守礼，说话滴水不漏。他是一个完美的八股文作者：每一个动作都符合「正派掌门」这个格式，每一句话都是代圣人立言。整个江湖都对他交口称赞，因为他在制度给出的每一项评分上，都拿了满分。

后来我们知道，他为了在五岳并派的争夺中胜出，偷学了辟邪剑谱。那部剑谱写在一件袈裟上，开头八个字是：「武林称雄，挥剑自宫。」他照做了。

我第一次读到这里只觉得骇然。这个早上再想，我觉得这是整部小说里最深刻的隐喻：为了在制度的游戏里赢，一个人可以亲手阉割掉自己身上最本真的部分。

《儒林外史》里有一个对照的人物：范进。他从二十岁开始应考，考到五十多岁，屡试不中，受尽岳父胡屠户的白眼。终于中举那天，他欢喜得疯了，要胡屠户一个耳光才打醒。

岳不群和范进，一个是赢家，一个是苦熬到最后的幸存者，但他们共享同一种悲剧：他们的全部注意力，都被制度定义的那个目标占满了。一个人在乎的东西如果只剩下排名，那么他在赢的那一刻，也就疯了。

和岳不群相对的，是他的大弟子令狐冲。

我以前一直以为令狐冲是个「反叛者」，后来发现完全不对。令狐冲从来没想过要反抗华山派。他敬重师父，爱慕小师妹，把华山当作自己的家。被逐出师门的时候，他痛苦得要命。

那他为什么最终和这个制度格格不入？

因为他真心在乎的东西，和制度要他在乎的东西不一样。他在乎酒，在乎朋友，在乎一首曲子，在乎一个人是不是真性情，而不在乎他是「正派」还是「魔教」。他和田伯光喝酒，和向问天并肩作战，把魔教圣姑任盈盈当作知己。在五岳剑派的评分表上，这些全是扣分项。可他根本没在看那张表。

金庸在后记里说，令狐冲是天生的「隐士」，对权力没有兴趣。

这里有一个我觉得很重要、却常被误解的地方：我们习惯把独立思考理解为一种立场，一种「敢于和大多数人不同」的勇气。可是立场是可以被收编的。今天反主流，明天就会有一个「反主流」的格式等着你去套——反主流本身，也会变成八股。

真正收编不了的，是一个人真实的在乎。

《红楼梦》里的贾宝玉也是这样。他骂那些一心读书求官的人是「禄蠹」，但他并不是一个有纲领的革命者。他只是真心觉得女孩子们的眼泪、园子里的诗社、一个丫鬟的冤屈，比「仕途经济」重要得多。

制度可以惩罚一种立场，却很难驯服一种在乎。所以，如果要问在一个高度制度化的世界里，独立思考最后的阵地在哪里，我的回答是：在你的注意力归属于谁。

令狐冲是怎么学到独孤九剑的？

不是在华山派的练武场上，而是在思过崖。那是华山派惩罚犯错弟子的地方，一块荒凉的崖顶，与世隔绝。他被罚上去面壁，却在那里发现了石壁上刻着的五岳剑法与破解之道，又遇到了隐居多年的剑宗前辈风清扬。

制度把他流放到边缘，而边缘恰恰是制度唯一管不到的地方。

历史上有一个几乎一模一样的故事。

王阳明年轻时，照着朱熹「格物致知」的说法去格亭前的竹子，格了七天，什么也没格出来，反而病倒了。要知道，朱熹的四书集注，正是科举的官方标准答案。王阳明照着标准方法论去做，失败了。

后来他会试两次落第。第二次落第时，同舍有人以不第为耻，他说：

再后来，他得罪了宦官刘瑾，被廷杖、下狱，贬到贵州龙场当驿丞。那是一个瘴疠之地，他在那里几乎一无所有。就是在龙场，他悟出了「心即理」，开创了心学。

蒲松龄屡试不第，七十多岁才援例成为一名岁贡生，却在落第的几十年里写出了《聊斋志异》。吴敬梓被荐举去应博学鸿词科，他没有去，后来写出了《儒林外史》。

这些故事放在一起，我看到一个规律：一个制度最有价值的产物，常常不是它培养出来的状元，而是它的流放地。

这不是在鼓励谁去落榜。而是说，思过崖不一定要等别人罚你上去，你可以给自己留一座。

写到这里，很容易得出一个廉价的结论：抛弃八股，拥抱自由。

但《笑傲江湖》里最深刻的一段，恰恰反对这个结论。

风清扬教令狐冲独孤九剑，讲的是「无招胜有招」。可是请注意，独孤九剑的本领是破——破剑式要破解天下各门各派的剑法。你要破一招，就必须先看懂这一招的来龙去脉、虚实破绽。令狐冲之所以学得快，恰恰因为他早已把华山剑法练得烂熟，又在思过崖的石壁上看遍了五岳剑法和它们的破法。

无招不是没学过招，而是把招看透之后，不再被招所束缚。

明代的李贽是出了名的异端。他写《童心说》，主张天下至文都出于「童心」——「绝假纯真，最初一念之本心」。可是他列举古今至文时，在《西厢曲》《水浒传》之后，竟然还列了一项「今之举子业」，也就是八股文。

我第一次读到这里非常意外：一个最反对假道学的人，居然承认八股也可以是至文。

后来我想明白了。李贽反对的从来不是形式，而是没有真心的形式。一个人用八股写出了真话，那就是至文；一个人用最自由的文体说着别人的话，那也是八股。

这和顾炎武其实是一回事：顾炎武恨的不是八股的格子，而是格子里装的全是背来的东西。

所以，在新八股里保持独立，不是拒绝背面试题、拒绝写规范的论文。恰恰相反，你应该把这些格式学到最熟，熟到能看见它们的结构，看见它们为什么是这样，看见它们在哪里失效。只有把招式看透的人，才有资格谈无招。一个连八股都写不好的人说自己追求自由，多半只是懒惰。

区别只在于：你学招，是为了被考官认可，还是为了有一天能破了它。

小说的名字，来自一首曲子。

《笑傲江湖》曲是两个人合写的：衡山派的刘正风和魔教长老曲洋。一个正派，一个魔教，按照制度，他们是不共戴天的敌人。可是他们因为音乐成了知己，一个抚琴，一个吹箫，写出了这首曲子。

刘正风想金盆洗手、退出江湖，只想好好吹箫。嵩山派不允许，在他的洗手大会上大开杀戒。刘正风和曲洋重伤之后，合奏了最后一遍，把曲谱托付给令狐冲，然后死去。

这是整部小说里我最喜欢的一段。它说出了一件残酷的事：真正的创造，往往不属于任何一个制度，因此也很难被任何一个制度容纳。刘正风和曲洋失败了，他们没能走出江湖。

可是那首曲子活下来了。它流传到令狐冲和任盈盈手里，而全书的最后，正是两人在新婚之夜合奏这首曲子。

还有一个细节常被忽略：令狐冲并不是一直在制度之外。恒山派危难之际，他临危受命，当了掌门，而且当得尽心尽力。等到风波平息，他把掌门之位交给了仪清，和盈盈一同归隐。

我想，这也许就是金庸给出的答案：独立不等于拒绝制度，而是接得起，也放得下。令狐冲可以挑起一个门派，却从来没有让掌门这个位置占据他的心。他心里那首曲子，始终属于他自己。

写到这里，窗外已经全亮了。鸟在叫，楼下有人开始扫地。新的一天又要开始，又是论文、邮件、日程表，又是一整天的格式。

我想把这个失眠的早上得到的东西记下来，也算给 Paul Graham 那个问题一个自己的回答：

在一个高度制度化、专业化的世界里，保留独立思考和自由创造的能力，也许不是逃离考场，而是在考场里，替自己留一段不为考官写的文字。

• 把招式学到最熟，然后不被招式所困；
• 身在门派，而注意力不归属于门派；
• 给自己留一座思过崖；
• 心里存一首不属于任何门派的曲子。

今晚，或者说今早，这几个小时的失眠，大概就是我的思过崖。没有人给它打分，没有人要求它有用，四颗褪黑素也没能把它收走。

我终于有点想睡了。

2026 年 10 月 21 日，悉尼，天亮时

I took four melatonin pills, and at six in the morning I still hadn't fallen asleep.

As dawn came on, my head, if anything, grew unusually clear, like an empty room someone had just swept. The copy of “Hackers & Painters” I had been reading before bed still lay open by my pillow. In it, Paul Graham keeps circling the same question: how should a person keep the ability to think independently and create freely in a highly institutionalized, specialized world?

At four in the morning, the first thing came to me: programmers today call their interview questions “eight-legged essays.” People cram the eight-legged essays of operating systems, of networking, of design patterns: rote answers to the standard questions. The term is used so naturally that no one seems to find it strange. Yet the eight-legged essay is plainly more than five hundred years old.

At five in the morning, the second thing came to me: “The Smiling, Proud Wanderer.” I read the novel long ago, and back then all I remembered were the Nine Swords of Dugu, Linghu Chong drinking, and Ren Yingying playing the zither. Not until this sleepless morning did it suddenly dawn on me that Jin Yong was never really writing about the martial world. He was writing about institutions.

And so this essay got its name: The New Eight-Legged Essays and the Smiling, Proud Wanderer.

When people talk about the eight-legged essay, it's easy to open with abuse. But I want to put in a fair word for it first, because unless you see clearly what was good about it, you can't understand how its faults grew.

When it was born, the imperial examination system was a remarkable invention. Before it, you became an official through your family's standing, through recommendation, through whom you knew. The imperial examinations made it possible, for the first time, for a son of a poor family to change his fate with a single exam paper. And the eight-legged essay was, in the end, a marking scheme: breaking open the topic, receiving the topic, beginning the discussion, entering the topic, then the opening, middle, later and closing legs. What each part should say, and how its paired lines should balance, were all fixed by rules.

Why so rigid? Because with tens of thousands of candidates across the country and hundreds of examiners, comparing them fairly meant turning essays into something that could be compared. Standardization is the price of fairness.

The trouble is that standardization has a gravity of its own.

At first, the format was there to make the content easier to judge; later, the format itself became the content. The eight-legged essay demanded “speaking on behalf of the sages”: you had to talk in the voice of Confucius and Mencius, and you were not allowed to say anything of your own. By the Ming and Qing, a scholar could know every line of the Four Books by heart and write neat, handsome eight-legged essays, yet go his whole life without saying a single sentence that was his own.

In his “Record of Daily Knowledge,” Gu Yanwu passed an extremely harsh verdict:

But few people notice that what he is attacking here is not really the eight-legged essay as a form, but “guessing the topics.” Candidates didn't read the classics. They memorized topics guessed in advance, with model essays to go with them, and got through the examinations by copying and by getting others to write for them, so that in the end, asked about a classic whose topics they hadn't guessed, they had no idea what book it even was. Gu Yanwu said that of all the ills of the examination halls in his day, none was worse than guessing the topics.

Remember this detail. It will come up in the next section.

One more thing to notice: the eight-legged essay could “bury” people not because it oppressed them, but because it rewarded them. The more closely you matched the form, the higher you scored; the less you were like yourself, the further you rose. The most powerful thing about a system has never been what it forbids. It is what it rewards.

We never got out of the eight-legged essay. We only changed the topics.

Programmers' interview “eight-legged essays” are the plainest example. Someone may never have really designed a system, yet be able to rattle off the TCP three-way handshake, how a HashMap resizes, how Redis persists its data. The interviewer asks standard questions, the candidate gives standard answers, and both sides know the game without saying so.

Isn't this exactly the “guessing the topics” that Gu Yanwu attacked? More than three hundred years on, even the name of the disease hasn't changed.

Academia has its eight-legged essays too. How to write a paper's introduction, how to list the related work, how to lay out the tables of experiments, on which dataset to beat the baseline by a few tenths of a point: there is an unwritten format for all of it. A graduate student may quickly learn to write “papers that look like papers,” yet find it harder and harder to answer one simple question: what is it you really want to understand?

Look further out: résumés have their eight-legged essays, performance reviews have theirs, and even WeChat Official Accounts have an eight-legged essay for going viral.

The new eight-legged essays have exactly the same structure as the old:

1. A standard, set up so that people can be compared fairly;
2. The standard slowly turns from a means into an end;
3. The system begins to reward the people who most resemble the standard, rather than the best.

So the real difficulty of “independent thinking” today is not whether you have the courage to say something different. It is this: the moment you most resemble everyone else is exactly the moment you are rewarded most.

Jin Yong wrote the perfect character for this predicament long ago.

In “The Smiling, Proud Wanderer,” Yue Buqun is known as “the Gentleman Sword.”

He is head of the Mount Hua sect: refined and courteous, correct in every observance, airtight in everything he says. He is a perfect writer of eight-legged essays. Every move he makes fits the format of “head of an orthodox sect,” and every sentence he speaks is spoken on behalf of the sages. The whole jianghu sings his praises, because on every item the system scores, he gets full marks.

Later we learn that, to come out on top in the struggle over merging the five sects, he secretly studied the Bixie Sword Manual. The manual is written on a monk's robe, and it opens with eight characters: “To rule the martial world, take up the sword and castrate yourself.” He did as it said.

The first time I read this, I was simply horrified. Thinking about it again this morning, I find it the most profound metaphor in the whole novel: to win at the system's game, a person can castrate, with his own hands, the truest part of himself.

“The Scholars” has a character who makes a telling contrast: Fan Jin. He started sitting the examinations at twenty and kept at it into his fifties, failing again and again and enduring the contempt of his father-in-law, Butcher Hu. On the day he finally passed the provincial examination, he went mad with joy, and it took a slap across the face from Butcher Hu to bring him round.

Yue Buqun and Fan Jin: one a winner, the other a survivor who ground it out to the end. Yet they share the same tragedy. All their attention was taken up by the goal the system had defined. If the only thing a person still cares about is the ranking, then the moment he wins is the moment he goes mad.

Set against Yue Buqun is his eldest disciple, Linghu Chong.

I always used to think of Linghu Chong as a “rebel.” Later I found that was completely wrong. Linghu Chong never once thought of rebelling against the Mount Hua sect. He revered his master, was in love with his junior martial sister, and thought of Mount Hua as his home. When he was expelled from the sect, it hurt him terribly.

Then why did he end up so out of place in this system?

Because the things he truly cared about were not the things the system wanted him to care about. He cared about wine, about friends, about a piece of music, about whether a person was genuine at heart, and not about whether that person was “orthodox” or of the “Demonic Cult.” He drank with Tian Boguang, fought side by side with Xiang Wentian, and took Ren Yingying, the Demonic Cult's “Holy Maiden,” as his kindred spirit. On the scorecard of the Five Mountains Sword Alliance, every one of these cost him points. But he wasn't even looking at the scorecard.

In his afterword, Jin Yong says Linghu Chong is a born “recluse,” with no interest in power.

Here is something I think matters a great deal, and is often misunderstood. We are used to seeing independent thinking as a stance, the courage of “daring to differ from the majority.” But a stance can be co-opted. Be anti-mainstream today, and tomorrow there will be an “anti-mainstream” format waiting for you to fit yourself into. Being anti-mainstream becomes an eight-legged essay too.

What really can't be co-opted is what a person genuinely cares about.

Jia Baoyu in “Dream of the Red Chamber” is the same. He calls the people who study only to win office “salary worms,” but he is no revolutionary with a program. He simply, sincerely feels that the girls' tears, the poetry club in the garden, the wrong done to a single maidservant matter far more than “official careers and worldly affairs.”

A system can punish a stance, but it has a hard time taming a kind of caring. So if you ask where, in a highly institutionalized world, the last stronghold of independent thought lies, my answer is: it comes down to whom your attention belongs to.

How did Linghu Chong learn the Nine Swords of Dugu?

Not on the Mount Hua sect's training ground, but on the Cliff of Repentance. That was where the Mount Hua sect punished disciples who had done wrong: a desolate clifftop, cut off from the world. He was sent up there to face the wall in penance, and there he found, carved into the rock, the swordplay of the Five Mountains sects and the ways to break it. There, too, he met Feng Qingyang, an elder of the Sword faction who had lived in seclusion for many years.

The system banished him to the margins, and the margins are the one place the system can't reach.

History has an almost identical story.

When Wang Yangming was young, he followed Zhu Xi's teaching on “investigating things to extend knowledge” and set out to investigate the bamboo in front of a pavilion. He investigated it for seven days, got nothing out of it, and fell ill instead. Bear in mind that Zhu Xi's commentaries on the Four Books were precisely the official standard answers for the imperial examinations. Wang Yangming followed the standard method, and failed.

Later he failed the metropolitan examination twice. After the second failure, when a fellow lodger felt ashamed of having failed, he said:

After that he offended the eunuch Liu Jin, was flogged at court, thrown into prison, and banished to be postmaster at Longchang, in Guizhou. It was a land of miasma and fever, and there he had next to nothing. It was at Longchang that he arrived at the insight that “the mind is principle,” and founded the School of Mind.

Pu Songling failed the examinations time after time and became a tribute student only in his seventies, and then only by precedent; yet in those decades of failure he wrote “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.” Wu Jingzi was recommended for the special examination for eminent scholars. He didn't go, and later he wrote “The Scholars.”

Putting these stories side by side, I see a pattern: the most valuable thing a system produces is often not the top scholars it turns out, but its places of exile.

This isn't to encourage anyone to fail. It's that you don't have to wait for someone to send you up a Cliff of Repentance as punishment. You can keep one for yourself.

At this point, it's easy to reach a cheap conclusion: throw out the eight-legged essay and embrace freedom.

But the most profound passage in “The Smiling, Proud Wanderer” argues against exactly this conclusion.

When Feng Qingyang teaches Linghu Chong the Nine Swords of Dugu, the whole point is that “no moves beats moves.” But notice: the art of the Nine Swords of Dugu is breaking. The sword-breaking form is meant to break the swordplay of every school and sect under heaven. To break a move, you first have to understand it through and through: where it comes from and where it leads, which parts are real and which are feints, where its openings lie. Linghu Chong learned fast precisely because he had long since drilled the Mount Hua swordplay until he knew it inside out, and had studied, on the rock walls of the Cliff of Repentance, all the swordplay of the Five Mountains and the ways to break it.

Having no moves doesn't mean never having learned any. It means seeing through the moves so completely that they no longer bind you.

Li Zhi, in the Ming dynasty, was a notorious heretic. In “On the Childlike Mind,” he argued that all the finest writing in the world comes from the “childlike mind”: “wholly free of falsehood, pure and genuine, the original mind of the very first thought.” Yet when he listed the finest writing of past and present, after “Romance of the Western Chamber” and “Water Margin” he went so far as to add one more: “the examination writing of today,” that is, the eight-legged essay.

The first time I read this, I was very surprised. A man who opposed sham moralizing more fiercely than anyone had actually conceded that the eight-legged essay could be among the finest writing.

Later I understood. What Li Zhi opposed was never form, but form without a true heart in it. If someone writes the truth in an eight-legged essay, that is the finest writing; if someone speaks other people's words in the freest of forms, that is an eight-legged essay too.

Gu Yanwu was really saying the same thing. What he hated was not the boxes of the eight-legged essay, but that everything inside the boxes had been learned by rote.

So keeping your independence inside the new eight-legged essays doesn't mean refusing to memorize interview questions or refusing to write papers by the conventions. Quite the opposite: you should learn these formats as thoroughly as you can, so thoroughly that you can see their structure, see why they are the way they are, see where they stop working. Only someone who has seen through the moves has the right to talk about no moves. Someone who can't even write a decent eight-legged essay and says he is after freedom is, more often than not, just lazy.

The only difference is this: do you learn the moves to win the examiner's approval, or so that one day you can break them?

The novel takes its name from a tune.

The tune “The Smiling, Proud Wanderer” was written by two men together: Liu Zhengfeng of the Hengshan sect of the south, and Qu Yang, an elder of the Demonic Cult. One was orthodox, the other of the Demonic Cult: by the rules of the system, they were mortal enemies. Yet music made them kindred spirits. One played the zither, the other the flute, and together they wrote this tune.

Liu Zhengfeng wanted to wash his hands in a golden basin, retire from the jianghu, and simply play his flute. The Songshan sect would not allow it, and turned his hand-washing ceremony into a massacre. Gravely wounded, Liu Zhengfeng and Qu Yang played the tune together one last time, entrusted the score to Linghu Chong, and died.

This is my favorite passage in the whole novel. It says something cruel: real creation often belongs to no system, and for that very reason it is hard for any system to accommodate. Liu Zhengfeng and Qu Yang failed. They never made it out of the jianghu.

But the tune survived. It passed into the hands of Linghu Chong and Ren Yingying, and the book ends with the two of them playing it together on their wedding night.

There's another detail that often gets overlooked: Linghu Chong was not always outside the system. When the Hengshan sect of the north was in peril, he accepted the charge in its hour of danger and became its head, and he gave the job everything he had. Once the storm had passed, he handed the headship to Yiqing and withdrew from the world with Yingying.

I think this may be Jin Yong's answer: independence doesn't mean refusing the system. It means being able to take it up, and able to put it down. Linghu Chong could shoulder a whole sect, yet he never let the position of head take over his heart. The tune in his heart always belonged to him alone.

As I write this, it's already fully light outside the window. Birds are singing; downstairs someone has started sweeping. A new day is about to begin: papers again, emails, the calendar, another whole day of formats.

I want to write down what this sleepless morning gave me, and let it count as my own answer to Paul Graham's question:

In a highly institutionalized, specialized world, keeping the ability to think independently and create freely may not mean fleeing the examination hall. It may mean keeping, inside the examination hall, a stretch of writing for yourself that isn't written for the examiner.

• Learn the moves as thoroughly as you can, then don't let them trap you;
• Belong to a sect, but don't let your attention belong to it;
• Keep a Cliff of Repentance for yourself;
• Carry in your heart a tune that belongs to no sect.

Tonight, or rather this morning, these few hours of sleeplessness have probably been my Cliff of Repentance. No one gives it a score, no one requires it to be useful, and four melatonin pills couldn't take it away.

At last I feel a little sleepy.

Sydney, October 21, 2026, at daybreak