By chance (probably because I couldn’t sleep, so I drank and wandered around on the Internet after drinking to hypnotize), I saw the braised pork tutorial written by Brother Gohan. This is a tutorial that stood out to me, because it retains basically all the essential steps (except for using cooking wine instead of good rice wine), and there are still many must-have steps in my mind. . It can also be seen from this person's words that he is a cook of the "Popular Cookbook" school. My father's generation grew up watching "The Popular Cookbook." So, it’s especially kind to watch him cook. I looked at his other cooking tips one after another, such as mapo tofu, etc., and I felt that "one point more is obscene, and one point less is flat." These ten words naturally praise his cooking skills. However, when he posts the recipe on social networks, to put it bluntly, he has not tasted it in his mouth and cannot comment on the taste. Therefore, it is more about his cooking process. Some people are obsessed with tedious cooking, doing everything possible, and they are very knowledgeable about how each step is indispensable. Other people pay attention to cooking in short, quick and simple steps, the better. Sometimes they even skip the step of blanching and skimming. Not so with Brother Gohan. His recipes are rarely original and unconventional, and they are all inherited from long-term hard work. Ancient wisdom and practical experience are highly respected here, but every step is meticulous and not casual. In my humble opinion, this is exactly a mature attitude: not pursuing fancy complexity, but pursuing refinement in every detail.

Recently I have been paying off some literary debts and catching up on some deadlines. I just paid off my biggest literary debt yesterday, and the rest is just a summary for the time being, or just a political article itself. Today I received two good news: the approval of my temporary residence permit application and the appointment of a teaching assistant position next semester, so I can take this as an excuse to give myself a half-day off. During this holiday, I cannot help but reflect on my work status over the past month and the changes in the way I have been writing papers. Mo Shuitian published an "I said" on August 4: "Revising two English papers at the same time is a feeling of struggling in despair. I don't know whether I can be reborn. Ha Jin said that every time he writes a work, it is the same difficulty. , Isn’t it like this when writing a paper? How to deal with the succession and transition is different every time. "I was very sad when I started to work hard to pay off my debts. The other party said, "We are very interested in the third and fourth parts of your master's thesis." So, I put forward the contents of these two parts and found that they could not be put into their discussion framework at all. Many things were written down when my understanding was much more superficial than now. So, I had no choice but to sigh and completely update the concept, structure, argumentation, and documentation. Except for retaining some core texts, I redid almost the entire article, forming a new article with a text of 25,000 yuan. If it were a little more wordy in some places, it would be another master's thesis. When I told Vika with a tired look on my face that I had almost rewritten my thesis, she said that this was normal because understanding was constantly improving and her doctoral thesis would also be rewritten next year. Yes, Mo Shuitian is right, every paper is different. There is no single model that can help us mass-produce papers. The paper itself is alive. It carries the writer's thoughts. Sometimes it stubbornly wants to go into another dark realm, a wrong path that the writer is not familiar with, but the writer has no choice but to pretend to be brave and follow it forward. Specific to the paper I just finished writing, those dark areas are the terminological differences between church history, political peace, and political philosophy and political practice. On the one hand, I wanted to escape; on the other hand, I was glad that I still did not choose to escape, but tried my best to illuminate these areas.

Just when I was reflecting on whether I was guilty of trivialism and minimalism in my own cooking, I realized that one of the more mature aspects of this recent article than my previous articles is that it finally Consciously try to overcome obsessing over unnecessary details and self-admiration, and try to be as clear as possible on key issues. Perhaps this is the direction in which my composition moves closer to Brother Gohan’s cooking: lavishly abandoning trivial skills, but doing the best under the existing conditions. However, overall, the expectation of thinking big and starting small has not been fully realized. I think that a good paper should be majestic, powerful, clean and neat in its overall structure, but it should be very detailed and meticulous in its specific and important details. Now it seems that this article is just a few extra words that need to be explained to domestic readers, and it is far from being delicate. So we still have to keep working hard in the future.

The first paper I wrote seriously was Rawls’ Methodology of Political Philosophy. This paper was constantly revised to cope with many course papers. The second article should be Weber's Bureaucracy and Personal Freedom, which is also my undergraduate thesis. What the master's degree student has written seriously has been basically published from beginning to end. Then there’s the master’s thesis. The previous article was a thirty-year review of natural law. Finally, there is the latest article on secularization. Papers written carefully have basically gone through various forms of "defense". The question the defense team always says is "We can't understand what you wrote."

When I was young, I always thought to myself, “You who study philosophy can’t understand what I wrote about Rawls/you who study administration can’t understand what I wrote about Weber/you who study legal philosophy can’t understand what I wrote about Lefur. ...You guys are not up to par with your work, but you still have the nerve to point it out.” Later, when I became an editor myself, I realized that “not being able to understand” was a perfectly normal thing. So I slowly began to try my best to explain it at least so that colleagues who are not working in the same direction can understand it, in the hope that academic exchanges can continue. Including when I was defending my master's thesis, the teacher in the defense team said, "These are all French documents. Are you bullying us because we can't understand?" At the time, I just thought it was a joke, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt like I was sweating behind my back. . It also reminds me of a meeting where a middle-aged teacher criticized young teachers: "I see that you have cited a lot of English and German documents here, and of course they are all very good. But some documents have been translated into Chinese. In order to make it easier for everyone to Everyone can benefit from it. I think it is better to quote the Chinese version. If there is anything wrong with the translation, you have the responsibility to point out the problem in the footnotes. This is a serious and responsible attitude." This sentence was also left. In the ear and out in the right ear. It just came out of nowhere when I was writing my last paper. This is why I say that writing Chinese essays is the most tiring for international students: you have to speak to people in another context from one context, and you have to try to make them understand. So a lot of energy was invested in finding out whether the text I wanted to use had a Chinese translation, if so, whether there was any inappropriateness in the Chinese translation, and if not, what kind of similar research could help domestic readers understand the current discussion. The patience and energy slowly drained out of my body while searching for bits and pieces of information, until I was so tired in the middle of the night that I didn't want to move at all.

However, just like cooking, fancy means cannot support daily needs, and writing that is too heavily invested cannot last long. I wrote Rawls during the winter vacation. During the entire winter vacation, except for New Year's Eve, I almost never left the house or took a step out. I also wrote Weber during the winter vacation, but it was just after the Chinese New Year, and I sat in front of the computer almost all day long. When I was writing my master's thesis, I didn't last too long, just a few weekends. Open a bottle of wine and drink while writing from eight o'clock in the morning to ten o'clock in the evening. When you really can't continue writing, look at the bottle of Single Malt: Yeah! There is only a little left! When I was writing about natural law for thirty years, I was so weak that I fell down the stairs in the later stages. Writing in general makes me anxious, sensitive and moody, which are not good. Losing one's heart is the best way to describe my state. For example, while I was writing the review, I filled the refrigerator with milk, cheese, steak, and half-cooked pasta. I wake up in the morning and write right after I go for a run. When I feel hungry, I grab a piece of cheese and eat it, and then I continue writing. When I was writing at noon, I took out the pasta, covered it with cheese, heated it in the microwave, and ate it to understand what I was writing. When it’s dinner time, I’ll fry a steak and start writing. When I write that it’s time to go to bed, I open a bottle of red wine, drink it, and then go to sleep. On the contrary, when I was writing my latest paper, except for insomnia (I could only sleep four hours a day), I could eat, drink, exercise and play as usual. We even went to the beach once to eat seafood. At the same time, physical indicators such as strength, speed, and weight have even increased. "Home-cooked Meals Are Delicious" written by Miyazaki City praises Fan Zhongyan's philosophy. In my opinion, the reason why home-cooked meals are delicious is that the cooks have made this work a daily routine. We writers should also turn writing into a daily task rather than a sudden inspirational creation. Only in this way can we not interrupt the existing rhythm of life and continue writing for a long time.

Having said this, I think of Jia Yan again. Like his grandfather, Jiayan is a man of action who understands theory. They especially look down on people who show off their words and pens. Deep down, I am afraid that I will become the kind of person they despise, the kind of person who lives lightly without any sense of mission or responsibility. On the other hand, they also respect scholars. My father's greatest compliment to others is "He is a man of true talent and learning." There are probably no more than ten people who have received this evaluation. Among them are his teachers and my mentors. When I was a freshman, people often asked me "What is your major?". When I was a freshman, many people asked me "What is legal philosophy for?" Naturally, I don't have a definite answer to these questions. But in the past, I probably would have "not explained" as many people appreciate me. Now I, whether successful or not, try to explain our work to laypeople. As for the use of pure theory, perhaps most people cannot understand it. However, for professionals, this is no excuse for not explaining. In contrast, understanding difficulties requires us to explain our work to other experts. Because if we are indeed doing a valuable job, wouldn’t it be better to have others understand its value? Vaguely, I felt that this was a way to avoid having my elders look down upon me—although there was no logic to it. If scientific researchers have any responsibility to the public, I think it is not a sour term like social conscience, but it is to enhance the entire society's understanding of a certain professional knowledge. In this sense, the "What I Know" series and the "A Short Introduction to Oxford" series are achievements and honors that cannot be overstated, and are much better than the work of Berlin and Havel.