Work is the means by which the past can be forgotten

Work is the means by which the past can be forgotten is a claim about labor as protection from involuntary memory, not simply as useful activity. Set against sleep, dreams, and the image of flight, it suggests that work can occupy the mind so thoroughly that even the reasons behind the past may be cast off. The book complicates that escape: its narrator’s work is also an effort to recover and tell what happened, although the evidence proves incomplete.

The Claim and Its Contrast

Klaus Johannes says that sleeping is exhausting because it requires dreaming. The narrator offers a counterclaim: not working is exhausting because the mind is empty, leaving the past an opening through which to burst in. The contrast turns rest into a vulnerable state and work into a form of mental occupation. In the full formulation, labor can help not only to forget the past but also to cast off its reason. That second step makes the expression more radical than a promise of distraction: it imagines relief from the cause as well as the memory.

The passage does not present this as a simple triumph. The past remains capable of returning when work stops, while the succeeding images of a bird leaving its nest and of running away connect escape with departure. Work thus appears as a means of keeping the past at bay, not proof that it has been resolved. The idea carries both practical force and unease: what protects someone from memory may also become a way of fleeing it.

Work as a Way of Telling the Past

The book’s account of its own making gives the expression a revealing counterpoint. The narrator spent holidays over two years travelling on the railways of southern China and interviewing fifty-one middle-aged or elderly eyewitnesses. Only after compiling thousands of pages of notes did the narrator feel ready to write. Writing, ordinarily described as troublesome, became possible through the courage and patience associated with working in the south; the story then began to branch in new directions. Here, sustained work does not erase the past. It makes an account of it possible.

That account is presented as historical, gathered from taped transcripts, with a factual core the narrator says has been preserved. But the narrator also acknowledges adding framing and fictional elements, including personal names, places, and descriptions; omitting classified material; and sometimes supplying characters’ inner thoughts. The work of narration therefore stands in tension with the expression: labor may offer a way to put the past aside, yet this particular labor repeatedly returns to it, selecting, arranging, and giving form to what can be known.

Memory, Evidence, and Uncertainty

The narrator’s final clarification makes that tension concrete. The account had drawn suspicions about its truthfulness, prompting an explanation of how the ending was shaped. Contrary to the version first told, Vasili was not the person who found Rong Jinzhen at a paper mill or printing works in M County. The Director of Unit 701 personally went to bring Rong home; Vasili had fallen gravely ill in the days after the events. The narrator nevertheless chose to have Vasili perform that role in the ending.

Even the location and date resist firm recovery. The chauffeur who accompanied the Director was functionally illiterate and could not say whether the building was a paper mill or a printing works. Despite the narrator’s explanation of their differences, his account remained unclear; he was also old, and his memory had been worn down by tobacco and drink. He insisted the incident happened in 1967 rather than 1969. These uncertainties show the limits of work as recovery: investigation can clarify why accounts diverge, but it cannot make every remembered detail certain. The expression’s promise of forgetting therefore sits beside the narrator’s labor of witness and reconstruction, a labor that keeps the past present even as the novel describes the wish to escape it.