5 ideas
In the title essay, Zhou borrows the ending of Voltaire's Candide, 'we must cultivate our garden,' to defend a writer's right to tend a private plot. Whether one grows roses and violets or cabbages, sincere cultivation of one's own ground is legitimate, and critics who order everyone to plant vegetables for the public good are wrong. Flowers are no less useful to people than food.
Literature should grow out of and serve human life, but it should not be written as a tool for a social or moral program. The writer's task is to express an authentic individual temperament. Any social benefit comes as a byproduct of that sincerity, and when benefit is made the goal, the result is preaching rather than art.
Literature develops only when divergent styles and schools are allowed to coexist, because its vitality comes from individual variation, not conformity. The real threat is majority orthodoxy rather than minority dissent. Rebels who win often turn into enforcers of a new uniformity, so tolerance has to be defended even against one's own side.
When Yu Dafu's 1921 story collection 'Sinking' was attacked as immoral for depicting sexual frustration and despair, Zhou published a defense. He separated literature that merely exploits sexuality from honest art that portrays a young man's erotic and national anguish. He argued that such work is judged by sincerity and artistic truth, not by conventional moral hygiene, and should be read as art for mature readers.
Zhou treats small idle pleasures, such as tea, seasonal foods and aimless leisure, as essential to a humane life rather than as frivolous. A life reduced to necessity and usefulness becomes dry and mechanical. Attending to unproductive enjoyments is therefore a quiet refusal of instrumental thinking and the ground of the personal xiaopin essay.