Watching the snow at the lake pavilion

Zhang Dai lived in Hangzhou in the Ming. One winter there was so much snow that he waited until everyone else was asleep, took a small boat, and went out onto the lake with a stove and a fur coat.

He wrote: mist, sky, water and cloud all white. And in that white, one line of the causeway, the pavilion one dot, my boat one speck, and the two people in it two grains of rice.

Then he arrived at the pavilion and found two men sitting there, drinking, with a stove between them, who laughed when they saw him and said: there are people like this in the world.

They drank. He asked their names. They told him and he told them his. When he left, the boatman muttered: you think you're the only one who's mad.

Everything good in this piece is in the second half. He'd gone out to be alone with something beautiful, and found strangers who were also alone with something beautiful, and they drank, and by the time he landed they were gone.

The most interesting word in the piece is the boatman's. Mad. That's what any deliberate act looks like from outside.

The practice isn't solitude. It's refusing to explain the act to the person who called it mad. He didn't argue. He wrote it down.

MOJOWAY is a similar refusal. You write the honest version of the day without having to defend it to anybody, and that record gradually becomes the most reliable thing you have about yourself.