Five Spice Street

We might as well say that this declaration was one component of her murderous nighttime activity. It also showed her stupidity. If she wanted to be a genius, she needed to be down-to-earth and endure humiliation and thereby gain the people’s trust. She could never achieve her objective by being so blindly self-indulgent and using such crooked ways. Who had ever seen a misfit succeed? Just think of how much castigation and censure the writer had endured to reach the position he holds today, and yet the people still haven’t publicly recognized him as a genius (the writer knew that this was because they were exceedingly prudent; in fact, they had long ago tacitly recognized him. The writer understood this). Madam X was a different case. She did nothing (just think about the writer’s difficult interviews!). She ‘‘had nothing to do with people.’’ She just hid out in her little room, engaging in magic. How could she expect to be recognized as a ‘‘genius’’? Isn’t she insane? She even attempted to alter the definition, declaring that the common practice of geniuses (climbing up on a thatched cottage or a hill) was ‘‘merely an artificial pose,’’ and that they ‘‘didn’t have to be that serious,’’ blah, blah, blah. Wasn’t she implying that we had to accept her redefinition of genius? Of course, she also said that there were no geniuses today, that they were already a thing of the past. She had only one goal: ‘‘to turn the world upside down.’’ And from this, she reaped unfair gains. We can say for sure: Madam X was definitely unable to do anything like climb to the roof of a thatched cottage or climb to a mountaintop. She suspected that the gods would punish her-whether by lightning or by accidental death. She ridiculed things she couldn’t do, saying it wasn’t that she couldn’t do them, but that they weren’t worth doing, thinking that this would elevate her over others.

She told her sister: ‘‘As for taking great pains to imitate a genius, it would be better for me to sell a few more pounds of peanuts! That benefit would be real…’’ When the people crowded together below the thatched cottage to listen to the genius’s words, she deliberately lowered her head and looked down and went about her work at the snack shop. When someone questioned her, she affected surprise and said that she had never paid attention to public life. Her inner life was so rich and happy that she saw no reason to pay attention to external matters. She ‘‘angrily brushed off’’ the visitor’s hand (the visitor had tried to take her to the thatched hut, saying that this was the closest route to the elites). She chided the visitor for ‘‘interfering in her individual freedom’’ and said that she ‘‘would never take part in such foolish, deceptive nonsense!’’ She wouldn’t waste her energy on this kind of ‘‘pointless thing at the cost of selling one less ounce of peanuts.’’ She had precisely allocated her energy, and this system ‘‘couldn’t be altered.’’ Ruining her system was the same as ‘‘robbing’’ her. She stared at the visitor with her third eye for a long time and concluded that he ‘‘was a dust rag.’’ Then she bent her head and weighed peanuts, paying no more attention to him. Completely unaware of this, the visitor wanted to argue, but Madam X’s husband hit him with a broom handle and threw him out of the shop. ‘‘This dust rag was in the wrong place, and that bothered you. I threw it into the garbage,’’ he said in a leisurely tone.

Now, let’s return to the diagram of the maze. We have followed the thread to where Madam X surveyed the territory, settled on Five Spice Street as a new base, and harmed people with a soft knife. To substantiate this, the writer compared and contrasted her activity with that of geniuses, providing readers with almost ‘‘a complete general understanding.’’ The writer’s work went on smoothly and was about to succeed, but he didn’t guess the new problems he would encounter. The writer’s research suffered a major setback when Madam X gave up her nighttime activities and scurried to the street to proclaim her desire to ‘‘normalize’’ her relationship with the adulterous lover. The result was that people objected to the characterization of her nighttime activities as ‘‘murderous.’’ Someone even joked, ‘‘Nighttime activities? That’s purely her personal bagatelle!’’ People turned their gazes completely from her nighttime activities to the ‘‘adultery.’’