Su Shi
I dare not write
Stopping the defence is a decision
Letters after the Crow Terrace poetry case
After his own words were used to build a case against him, did he keep writing? The question is which kind he stopped.
What actually happened?
In the Crow Terrace case, Su Shi's poems were read line by line as evidence of slander against the throne. He spent over a hundred days in prison and nearly lost his life. Afterwards, in letter after letter to friends, the same sentence: I dare not write. It wasn't fear — he wrote his most famous work in those same years. What he stopped was a different thing: defending himself, arguing who was right. He kept the two clearly apart.
You pay for the defence yourself
Arguing over who was right spends your hours and the other person's patience, and winning returns neither. Worse, it has no end: every reply earns another, unless somebody stops. Stopping isn't conceding. It's capping the cost.
Answering every objection in the comments until 2am, and waking up to three more.
It's an action you can tell you took
'Let it go' can't be executed — there's no way to know you've done it. 'I don't write that kind of thing anymore' can: next time your fingers move, you know what you're doing. A mood can't be kept. An action can.
Write it and don't send it. Leave it 24 hours. Most of the time you no longer want to.
Know which kind stops and which continues
He stopped the defending, not the writing. The distinction matters: putting down the pen entirely is self-punishment and takes the real work with it. Only one kind should stop — the kind whose purpose is to make someone admit you were right.
Correct the record once. The second time is usually no longer about the record.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you're being misread or blamed, you keep explaining, and it keeps getting worse.
Ask first: is the next thing I write meant to make the facts clear, or to get someone to say I was right? If it's the second, that's the sentence to stop at.
Where it goes wrong: hearing this as say nothing — clarify a fact once; and don't stop the real work along with it. He stopped the defence, not the writing.
Lines to keep
He stopped defending himself. He did not stop writing.
Every reply earns another, unless somebody stops.
'Let it go' can't be done. 'I don't write those' can.