[!TIP]\n> This article was obtained directly from image recognition, so there may be recognition errors.\n> If you have any questions, please leave a comment or wait for the author to manually proofread.\n\n:::warning\nThis article may contain depressive content; if you have concerns about illness, please decide for yourself whether it is appropriate to read.\n:::\n\nFrom the beginning, there were an old man and a young blind pair who lived by telling stories and playing music. The old blind man's master had a prescription that could cure, but it required a thousand broken strings as a medicinal lead. But after gathering, the old blind man, in the words of many literate people, was forced to admit a fact: the prescription is a blank sheet of paper. When the strings are broken and the song ends, the old blind man hands the prescription to the young blind man, telling him to break twelve hundred strings. The story returns to the beginning: an old man and a young blind man.\n\n# Strings\n\nThe strings in the text are the strings of the instrument; they are the tools the two blind men use to tell stories. Even in the oppressive heat, what the old blind man cared about was 'Don't mix up the three strings.'\n\nBut why are a few strings so important to the old blind man? Because these are not ordinary strings; they are the source of a thousand strings used as the medicinal catalyst, the hope his life needs.\n\nTwo strings break, a thousand strings are discarded. In a few brisk exchanges, Shi Tiesheng, with deft artistry, makes the old blind man's joy leap onto the page. At that moment the day was hot, but Shi Tiesheng's pen turns, and heavy snow suddenly falls. One cannot see the person; one sees the scene first; evidently, fate would not let things go as one wishes.\n\nWhen you are in the audience, eager to go on stage to receive the prize, your arch-enemy suddenly appears and says the award certificate was wrong — it should have been given to him. How would you feel?\n\nDespair, just as the old blind man, full of joy, asks someone to read the prescription. Fifty years of effort and anticipation are told to be only a blank sheet, just as Shi Tiesheng, young and strong, was paralyzed in the lower limbs by a high fever. No one can endure such a blow from fate.\n\nThe old blind man sat for three days and three nights. Yet even so, he did not understand why his master would deceive him, until he remembered the master's miscount of the thousand strings.\n\nIn other words, this prescription itself is a gimmick. Breaking strings is the will to stay alive. Shi Tiesheng only says that the old blind man deceived the young blind man again and added two hundred broken strings; can we imagine that before that there were eight hundred, six hundred, four hundred, or even two hundred strings? It is entirely possible.\n\nThe strings in the text are, more than anything, strings of fate.\n\n\u201cA string, when taut, can sound a new note; but once a string is broken, it can never be taut again.” This line from the old blind man's master appears in the old blind man's memory under the despair of a blank sheet of paper. Now this principle is evidently clear: life must have a goal; with a goal there is the motivation to strive. Once the goal is achieved, life loses its meaning.\n\nThe old blind man has already three-quarters buried himself, clearly no longer caring about his own death. But he cares about others, about his young apprentice. The young blind man, overwhelmed by dismissal and grief, remains stuck in the snow. The old blind man cures him and passes the prescription to him. ‘He endured all blows and passed the goal of living to the “next one.’ Let the young blind man have a goal to strive for: “1,200 broken strings.’'\n\nShi Tiesheng does not reveal the old blind man's ending at the end; was he ultimately dead or alive?\n\nI think he probably died. It's not hard to imagine that a person who has lost hope in life and lost a sense of purpose would have his three souls and six faculties long since dispersed; though he panting, how is he different from a zombie? Such a person, how could they be different from a dead person? No difference.\n\nWriting this article isn't about motivational enlightenment, because this kind of 'chicken soup' topic isn't meaningful and people don't like it, so why did I write it? No one reads.\n\nShi Tiesheng, in his darkest moments, used his pen to carve a path. In the prime years when one could still walk, what else could one do?\n\nAs a child I often wondered about him, near or far, there would always be something to pull life along; this may sound good to you.\n\n# Life as a String\n\nSince we've written up to here, we must delve into the title meaning that Mr. Shi didn't think of. Well, this is also the part the exam setter likes best: it's not about making you think about what the author wants to say, but guessing how the setter conceived the prompt.\n\nStrings are fragile. The old blind man spent half a lifetime snapping a thousand strings, and on average one string was broken every 19 days. That seems to prove nothing. Well, for my own will, I'll impose a meaning that 'life is very fragile' on it. But life is indeed fragile: you mess with it a few times, and it breaks. Then depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and all sorts of other mental illnesses appear.\n\nThe young blind man: A thousand broken strings? That's easy!\n\nIn reality there are certainly cases where one broken string leads to knots that persist. But what can we do? This is not something I can influence, or indeed what I can change.\n\nStrings can produce beautiful music, and life can also do what it likes and shine, but you must first tune the strings properly. If one piano string produces a low note, or a string that isn't tightened produces a high note, that's clearly asking too much. Then we see some ridiculous situations: people understand that strings must be tuned to the right tension to produce suitable and beautiful tones, and understand how to adjust growth so that flowers and fruits appear, yet they force others to do things they dislike, and still insist they perform well, under the guise of 'the strong adapt to the environment' or 'I'm doing this for your own good.'\n\nStrings can produce beautiful music, but that doesn't mean you can squander them like this. Strings are also very fragile.\n\n# Afterword\n\nAfter finishing Shi Tiesheng's Prose Selection, I realized that there are many places where God appears. But I don't know what that means, at least for me, who grew up with a materialist view of history, it's hard to understand (in fact, praying to gods at this moment would be to no avail).\n\nFrom a normal person's perspective, this article is irrational. This is understandable. But if you put yourself in the shoes of a depressed patient, some parts are also perplexing, because you don't know him, don't know his suffering.\n\nWriting this article, I from the beginning did not expect anyone to understand, because this article is not suitable for reading by 'normal people,' oh, this is the result of different times' thinking. So, let's just say I'm going mad.\n\nYi Xiwei Guang\n\n2025.9.17