Gao Lian’s withdrawn mental state

Gao Lian’s withdrawn mental state is a retreat from ordinary social and temporal life into vigilance and memory. Kept in darkness and dependent on a woman who feeds him, he tries to anticipate what cannot be controlled; as the surrounding world recedes, drawing becomes an inward activity whose results he refuses to see.

Confinement and vigilance

Gao’s withdrawal takes shape within an imposed confinement. The woman leaves a Thermos beside his bed, then slides a bookcase back across the concealed doorway and latches it; he is expected to manage until evening. The arrangement makes food and access to the outside depend on her, while the hidden entrance renders the boundary between his room and the world literal. His isolation is therefore not simply a chosen quietness: it is a condition organized by another person’s control of his surroundings.

Within that condition, Gao treats speech as a danger. The account associates him with lies and slander and emphasizes that, as a man from Wuhan, he must be careful about what people say. He believes nothing should be allowed to surprise him, because control distinguishes him from an animal unable to plan for deviations from the norm. His example is a squirrel that stores nuts in a tree trunk but cannot understand what has happened when the hole freezes; unable to reach its food, it gives up and dies. The image makes his vigilance appear both strategic and precarious: he insists on preparing for the unpredictable precisely because a failed plan could mean helplessness.

A different experience of time

For Gao, waiting empties time of value. Time is described as nothing because it consists of waiting; what comes afterward belongs to an opposite order, in which events no longer unfold as a continuous sequence. The passage briefly imagines that other state through bodily readiness: tense muscles, a tightening stomach, shallow but oxygen-rich breathing, and a pulse rising from its earlier slowness into a roar. Each second would then possess its own beginning and end, and even a hundredth of a second’s hesitation could separate life from death.

This anticipation is set against Gao’s judgment that time favors the weak-willed and those incapable of action. The contrast shows why waiting is not neutral for him. It is at once the condition imposed by captivity and something he mentally rejects as weakness. His attention dwells on the instant when waiting might give way to action, but the passage does not show him acting; it shows him preparing himself through an imagined state of complete alertness. Time thus becomes less a measure of change than a pressure he tries to master.

Drawing without looking

The woman gives Gao pen and paper, and he spends hours drawing in the dark. He draws from an internal store of memory: people he has seen, things he misses, and feelings he has forgotten having. One image is a little bird in its nest with its young. When he finishes a sheet, he puts it aside and begins another, but he never stops to look at what he has drawn.

That refusal to look distinguishes the act from ordinary picture-making. The drawings are not presented as objects he examines, judges, or shares; the passage instead emphasizes the inward process that supplies their subjects and the repeated motion of making another sheet. Even the bird with its young remains one remembered image among many, not an explained symbol. What is clear is the separation between producing an image and turning outward to see it. His hand continues working while his attention stays directed toward the store of memory from which each subject comes.

The woman and the inward turn

The woman who feeds Gao is described as neither true nor false. In relation to her, he has no longer any time before her and no after; time is nothing. This does not establish what she means to him beyond the practical dependence already visible in the food and confinement. Instead, it shows how thoroughly his sense of sequence has contracted around her presence: the passage offers no accessible life before her and no imagined continuation beyond the present arrangement.

The account finally describes all of Gao as turned inward, toward the mechanics of memory. That formulation gathers together his guardedness about speech, his effort to anticipate surprises, his rejection of waiting, and his drawings made without inspection. The withdrawal is not depicted as a blank mind. It is an intense, enclosed activity: memory supplies images, thought rehearses control, and the outside world is reduced to the woman who feeds him and the conditions she imposes. By making the drawings unseen and time nearly void, the narrative presents his isolation as both deprivation and a narrow form of mental survival.