We don't always have to look for winners and losers in books; what is more worth looking for may be a state between winners and losers, that is, not to think too far of things... Reading is about helping us understand ourselves and helping us understand others. My suggestion is that people read a little more.
——Hong Zicheng, "Reading" and "Reading History""
"Reading" and "Reading History"
The history of personal reading may also be the history of his life
In the past, in literary studies or other fields of study, our attention was focused only on the author himself and the texts he wrote, and relatively little attention was paid to the question of "reading". Who are the readers of a book reading? How to read it? How do readers with different identities and different eras react differently? What is the relationship between books as a material means and reading? ...... We rarely think of these kinds of problems.
The Canadian scholar Manguel's "History of Reading", published a few years ago, discusses the historical changes in human reading behavior: the changes in the history of "reading", the impact of changes in paper, printing, transmission and other conditions on reading, such as in Europe, when did the desk dedicated to writing and reading appear, what kind of impact the change in printing conditions would bring to writing and readers, and so on. Reading is an important spiritual activity in the basic way of human existence.
A scholar once said that if a person read Don Quixote or Hamlet every year and then records his feelings about reading the book every year, then this record is also the history of his life. It makes sense to say that a man's reading history is the history of his life. If we find this definition exaggerated, we might think that his state of life and changes will leave traces in this record.
The relationship between the reader and the book
Reading involves many aspects of the problem. For example, who is reading; what nature of the book is being read; the specific conditions and situations of reading: time, place, emotional state... Whether we realize it or not, when we read a book, we will establish a special relationship with the book. Reading a theoretical book and reading a literary work, your mentality and expectations, and the meaning of the book, are completely different. Reading new books and old books also feel different. In the past, I often went to the reading room of the old periodicals of Peking University, where I collected newspapers and magazines from before 1949. Of course, old periodicals are not easy to see now, because of the long age, the newspapers and periodicals of decades ago are easily broken, so they are generally not borrowed. They may all be made into microfilm or scanned on a computer for researchers to read. If you have a book printed in the 1930s or earlier, compared to reading the reprints of the current publishing house, I believe your feelings will be very different. You'll feel what you touch, the paper, the fonts, the way you frame, the ads... As a result, you imagine who will leave a mark on it when reading, and all your imagination will blend with specific historical situations. The hardcover book is different from the paperback, horizontal or vertical, and the feeling during reading will be different. The thickness of the book will also affect people's sense of reading. For example, a collection of poems does not need to be printed as thickly. Now some poetry collections are very thick, heavy in the hand, and feel very uncomfortable.
A few years ago, a poetry symposium was held in Sanming, Fujian Province, to commemorate a poet in Fujian. He has loved poetry all his life, not only writing his own poetry, but also paying a lot of effort to cultivate local poetry lovers and carry out poetry activities. He died of cancer, and Fujian Province held a commemorative meeting for him and published a collection of his poems. While he was alive, he did not get the opportunity to publish a collection of poems. So this time, I put all his poems in, six or seven hundred pages. This is of course a good intention, but it is a bit embarrassing for the reader. If it is not specifically studied by this poet, the average reader will find it a little difficult to hold in his hand. Read from scratch? After reading six or seven hundred pages, do you still have any feelings? If you choose to read, which page do you start from? At the symposium, I said a little off-topic. I say that I miss a little nostalgia for the collections of poems published in the 1930s and 1940s, and even the 1950s and 1960s, often tens of pages, or a hundred or so pages. I say that when reading poetry, the hands should be light; it should be to give the person reading more time to stay on it. Thin collection of poems, hold in your hand, you will not have a lot of pressure. What I said may not be right, it's my own idea.
124 pages of poetry – Asymmetry / [Poland] Adam Zagajewski / Yazhong Culture / 2021-9
Another common problem is whether to read the anthology or to read the whole collection. Of course, if you are not a special researcher, you will not read the Quan Tang Poems or the Quan Song Wen. Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize a few days ago, and the People's Literature Publishing House rushed to print a 20-volume "anthology" of all his works: this is a tribute to this writer, and there are also economic benefits in it. So would we read the Collected Works of Mo Yan or some of his anthologies? The same is true of other novelists and poets. We sometimes feel like we're clueless and don't know how to read it. However, sometimes I feel that the selection is not very assured, and it is easy to be led by the nose of the selector; because some of the selections have historical and personal prejudices. So, sometimes we don't trust the selection.
In addition, we may sometimes "take it for granted" when we read books. Professor Yuwen Soan of the Department of East Asian Studies at Harvard University has a book called "The Stone Record of His Mountain", which gives such an example when talking about ancient writing and reading, saying that in the pre-Qin or Warring States period, how was writing and reading carried out, and what method was used? How is writing and reading at that time different from modern society? We know that in the pre-Qin and Warring States eras, writing was carved on bamboo jane, so how long did he carve a book? Did the writers carve it themselves or hired someone to carve it? What kind of impact does such a way of "writing" have on the style? The other is who has the right to read? How much bamboo does a book need to fit all the content? Where are these bamboos hidden? Who can read it? How do you read it? We may not have thought about these questions before. The material conditions of "books" will certainly have great restrictions on writing and reading.
Jokingly, the pricing of books can also affect reading choices and moods. I published a book the year before called "My Reading History", published by Peking University Press, which contains the text of my human feeling after reading. I told the editor of the publishing house that the quality of the book is average, so don't price it too high, or readers won't want to buy it. But they didn't listen to me, more than two hundred pages, priced at 38 yuan. 38 bucks more or less? In fact, I really feel a little guilty, and I will ask myself, can those words be worth so much money? In 2011, I was invited by several schools in Guangxi to give lectures, staying in a hotel in Nanning, and at night I would look through the materials they had put in my room. One of them is a "delivery menu" with an egg fried rice set at exactly 38 yuan. In this comparison, I put my mind at ease, it is nothing more than an egg fried rice! However, there is now the opposite: some books are not selling well if they are priced too low. Because some people have a lot of money and like to buy beautiful books. It feels comfortable to read, even if you don't read it, it looks beautiful and stylish on the shelves.
"The pricing of books will also affect the choice of reading" / Image from Douban
Now there is a big problem. In the past we had a sense of "hunger and thirst" for books, and now that feeling has been lost, or not much. Yesterday I chatted with your teacher Li Baomin and said that when he was in college in the early 80s, he often used to run to the bookstore to see if there were any new books today after listening to the class and taking advantage of the rest of the more than ten minutes. Who would have such an urgent mood now? What used to be the era of the desire to have books is now the era when books have us. We are surrounded by a large number of books, so many books are published every year, and the bookstore is full of all kinds of reading materials, and it has become so easy to obtain books, and there is no longer a feeling of "hunger and thirst". So do I. When I was in middle school in the 50s, I had pocket money, and the first two books I bought were Guo Moruo's "Goddess" and the other was Lu Xun's short story selection. That feeling of having your own books, that kind of happiness, is not easy for people to experience now. So, as I just said, this is the age of book owners, not the age of people who aspire to have books. Just as the rich are now owned by money, the people in power are owned by power. When people are owned by books, they do not have the mood of being very eager to read.
This change is very profound for me. When I was teaching at the University of Tokyo in Japan in 1991, CD records were still rare and expensive in China. It's not cheap in Japan either, but public libraries can lend it out. I'll go to the library and borrow it back to listen to it, or copy it on a tape. When I borrow some beloved records, I have a feeling of lightness on the road. It was a very happy mood. Now there are so many CDs, including imported versions of classical music, that are easy to get. Not long ago I saw some imported versions of classical CDs in "Dangdang Network" in the price reduction, 5 yuan a piece. In the past, the same imported CDs sold for more than a hundred. So, things come too easily, good, and bad. Easily accessible things often do not know to cherish.
Rereading of the book
Some books we may read once, some may reread, or even read many times. There's an interesting thing here. In my own case, there are two different mentalities about rereading. One is a little scared that rereading might ruin the original good feeling. Reading Ba Jin's novel is when I was in junior high school, when I was young and New China was just founded, I had a ardent and romantic expectation for the future, and I also preferred that kind of passionate writing, Ba Jin's youthful and lyrical writing in the 20s and 30s was very appetizing to me at that time.
Professor Lu Zhenghui of Tamkang University in Taiwan should be more than ten years younger than me. He only read Ba Jin when he was older, because before the Kuomintang government "lifted the strict", books by mainland writers were banned in Taiwan; so he probably read Ba Jin until after the 1980s. He raised a question: Why did Barkin have such a high evaluation? In his opinion, it was like a middle school student's essay. What he said may be a bit excessive, but the artistry of Barkin's works, including words, does have many problems, some of which are rough and emotionally unrestrained. But when I was in junior high school, I was very moved, and some places still cried bitterly and cried badly. In the early 90s, when I was in Japan, a Japanese professor was taking a Chinese class, and he chose the passage where Ming Feng of Ba Jin's "Home" committed suicide, and there were some words and sentences that he didn't quite understand and asked me, so I reread it. I suddenly wondered about the crying and weeping of my youth, is there really such a thing happening? So this rereading, for me, is actually not good, unnecessary. I feel that if I don't reread it, preserving the mood of the 50s is a fortune for me. But rereading it throws away this "wealth", which is a bit of a pity. So, sometimes, I can't decide whether to reread a book I used to love.
Ba jin
However, in general, as knowledge and appreciation increase, the benefits of rereading usually outweigh the disadvantages. I wonder if you have read the Soviet writer Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago"? When I was traveling to Russia a few years ago, I visited his former residence in the "Writers' Village" of Belezerkino, on the outskirts of Moscow. Some say his poems are better written than his novels, and he's primarily a poet. However, his long story "Doctor Zhivago" received an even greater response. This novel was published in the mid-1950s, not in the writer's homeland, but in capitalist publishing houses. It was the Cold War, and because of its publication and the award of the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature to the novel, there was an uproar, and Doctor Zhivago became a platform for the struggle between the socialist and capitalist camps. As a result, under pressure from the Soviet authorities, Pasternak wrote a review and issued a public statement refusing to go to Stockholm to receive the award.
I know the name of this work because I read a critical article in the Literary and Art Newspaper in 1958 and left the impression that the novel was very reactionary and vicious. But at the time, until the mid-1980s, there was no Chinese translation of the Chinese mainland, and no one who wrote critical articles had read the novel. The Chinese translation only appeared in Chinese mainland 1987, and the feeling of reading it in 1987 was not as "reactionary" and "vicious" as originally thought. Of course, it is indeed a question of the October Revolution in the SOVIET Union. The protagonist, Zhivago, is a doctor from an aristocratic background, and at the beginning, he also longed for revolution, or at least had a good feeling, because the autocracy of old Russia was very dark and corrupt, and many people thought that a revolution was needed to change this old world and change the miserable lives of the people. However, after the revolution, Zhivago found that the situation was not as he imagined. He observed the new mental illness caused by the revolution mainly from a spiritual point of view. He found that empty talk, big talk, saying things against the heart, and doing things against the heart became a common phenomenon, which Zhivago called "fine bleeding of the heart".
I think this is the thing that these intellectuals are most distressed about and most disappointed. Of course, during the Cold War, this kind of spiritual questioning of the revolution was understandable under the circumstances of the time when the Soviet Union and the "socialist camp", including China, criticized it as anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary. But when I reread it in the 1990s and early 2000s, I unconsciously changed my focus. This change, I think, has something to do with the fact that my mind is no longer attached to a point. I mentioned this change in My Reading History, "An Extended Reading of a Novel." I think there is not only a passive worry about the spiritual consequences of the revolution, but also something positive, albeit weak. In terms of the powerful history and the relationship between the relatively helpless people's lives, the book also seems to express this meaning: "history" although it has a huge power to envelop and engulf individual life; however, the "rhythm" of individual life cannot necessarily be canceled, and there are tragedies of "can't" in life, and there are also "possible" struggles. In Pasternak's view, the constantness of human life is more important.
Pasternak
Moreover, I also had a curiosity about the Russian attitude towards nature that I wrote about in the book. It feels that nature is not an object of conquest or appreciation for them, and their lives are fused into it, forming their understanding of love, death, suffering, and happiness. So, Zhivago eventually died of a downfall, and his lover Lara was not overly sad. The book reads, "The plant kingdom can easily be seen as a close neighbor of the kingdom of death, and among the greenery of the earth, among the trees on the graveyard, in the rows of flower seedlings, there is the mystery of the transformation of life, which is the mystery we have always wanted to solve." That is, the work not only contains political propositions as we usually understand it, but also has richer content. Re-reading these discoveries that are different from the past, although they came a little late, but they are still important to me.
Reading is a kind of "overcoming"
Manguel's History of Reading, mentioned at the beginning, says that some illusions arose because of the advent of printing. For example, a manuscript can be printed in batches, thousands of prints, and their binding design is exactly the same, so it will give the reader the illusion that they are reading the same book. But in fact, Manguel says, they didn't read the same book. If we pick up the same version of Du Fu's Selected Poems at the same time, can we say that the "Selected Poems of Du Fu" you read is the same book as the one I read? The truth is actually very simple, because "there are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people." Sartre said that if a book is not read, it is just a black smudge painted on white paper, and once it is read, it must establish a different relationship with a particular reader than others. Therefore, the poet Nishikawa has two sentences in his book "Depths": One person who is familiar with the Analects refutes the other person who is familiar with the Analects to the point; Du Fu has received too much praise, so the other Du Fu must have gained nothing. Even what is seen in the Analects, or the truth that is derived, may be very different for different people at different times, and even go in the opposite direction.
Nishikawa
There is a great poet in Chile who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Neruda, who had a great influence in the Chinese literary circles in the 1950s and 1960s. We all loved poetry in college, and we all read his long poem "Logger, Wake Up!" 》。 The poem was written in 1948, and Yuan Shuipai translated it into Chinese that year. It is a political poem that celebrates the socialist Soviet Union and condemns the crimes of US imperialism, but the artistic level is indeed very high. In the 1950s, Neruda was seen as an imposing revolutionary poet (in fact, he was a member of the Chilean Communist Party); but in the 1980s, through the choice and interpretation of translators, Neruda became a poet of love. In the 1980s, there was a trend of "farewell to the revolution" in China, and a large number of love poems that Neruda "deleted" in China in the 50s and 60s of the revolution were selected and magnified at this time. What everyone remembers most now is probably his: "I like you are silent / As if you have disappeared / You listen to me from a distance / My voice can't touch you ..." According to Nishikawa, one Neruda receives too much praise, and the other Neruda gets nothing. On this issue, Professor Teng Wei of the Department of Chinese of South China Normal University's "South of the Frontier": Chinese Translation of Latin American Literature and Contemporary Chinese Literature (1949-1999) is a wonderful analysis.
We often say that writing is a kind of "overcoming", in fact, reading is also a kind of "overcoming", a challenge to the self, overcoming the limitations of fun and reading habits. There are some bad or flawed habits that the parties are less able to recognize. A few years ago, I went on a trip to Egypt with some teachers from the department of Chinese at Peking University, and when I took a boat ride on the Nile river to see the scenery, I didn't think it was very interesting, so I took out Berdyaev's "Russian Thought" and read it. A former student, now a teacher in the Chinese Department, saw me reading a book like this, and she shouted, "Teacher, you're exaggerating too," aren't you?!" Because Berdyaev was a Russian scholar and thinker, his book was a very serious scholarly work. I guess this student thinks that travel is to relax and relax, but I read such books, and I am still on the deck of the ship at public events, really pretending to be sophisticated, pretending to be thinking about advanced problems all the time, very learned.
Turgenev
This incident reminds me to examine one of my own problems, that is, the narrowness of reading and interests. I didn't realize it was a bad habit before, thinking that I had to read "useful" books and "valuable" books all the time. Compared with Teacher Xie Mian, we can see this, his interests and reading range are much wider than mine. Of course, he also read academic books, historical materials, poetry collections, and reviews, but he also reads historical records and local customs. He would take the floor plan of the Yuanmingyuan to the site to investigate the site, and also collect recipes from major cuisines, tasting both exquisite food and relishing the haggis soup at roadside stalls. This is the healthy, "normal" life and interest, and this is the state I lack – different environments have different readings. So, in most airport bookstores, you won't see esoteric academic books, and you won't have very serious novels. Most of them are the imperial series, the Kangxi Dynasty or something, or how to speculate in stocks, do business to make a fortune, how to manage business, etc., and there will be no "Russian Thought" or Marx's "Capital".
"Professional" vs. "Non-Professional" reading
Then, I'm going to talk about professional reading. I have been teaching and doing "learning" in schools all my life, and I have been doing this for decades since graduating from college in 1961, and my experience is very monotonous and poor. At the high school and university levels, the choice of reading is still relatively casual, and later most of them are from the "utilitarian" point of view, from the teaching, research topics to choose books, the purpose is very strong. To study which writer, read his works, materials about him; study the literary trends of a period, and also collect relevant materials as much as possible, and dusty old books and magazines. Some contemporary works are really tasteless to read, and many articles and materials in the fifties and sixties are quite boring and go around in a style. But whether you like it or not, for the sake of teaching, you can't read it, and you have to read it hard. In fact, the scholars and critics who write those articles are not talented enough, they have no way. Even so, now we can't read them, and doing learning means that there are many times to be the scalp. It's a "professional" kind of reading, and you have to do it when you're engaged in that profession and eating this bowl of rice. Teacher Li Zero of the Department of Chinese of Peking University said in the preface to his "Ancient Books and Academic Sources" that "the life of a scholar is to read for others, so he often cannot enjoy the pleasure of reading." If he suffers all his life, if he is as willing as he is, and if he does not want others to suffer with him twice, and suffer two sins, instead of sharing the labor and saving effort for others, it is unkind." I don't know if I belong to this "unkind" series, this question is too hard to think about. However, after retirement, there is indeed a sense of "liberation" and the ability to choose books and articles that I prefer to read.
This article is written by Hong Zicheng
Professionally, or professionally read, I have two suggestions. One is that you will see different views in different books, and there will be very different and even opposing propositions. If his views are not so infuriating, such as anti-humanity, for fascist or whatever, then under normal circumstances, a relatively peaceful attitude can be maintained towards different views. We don't always have to look for winners and losers in books; it's more worth looking for a state between winners and losers, which is not to think too far. Even if some ideas don't seem very well-standing, think about the context in which such views arise, what references they might give us, and whether they can provide some kind of inspiration in the way they look at the problem.
Mo Yan's winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature is a recent great joy for the Chinese literary community, and for decades, this award has been a "heart disease" for the Chinese literary community. Well, now that a Chinese writer has finally won the award, it is reasonable that this "heart disease" should be cured. But this is not the case, there are still many people who are unhappy, or that he is not qualified, or that there are at least ten Chinese writers who can win this award. For Chinese social politics and the people's hearts, Mo Yan has many expressions, more in his works, we still have to focus on his works.
Mo Yan told many stories in his speech at the Nobel Prize in Literature. The last story was told to him by his grandfather many years ago. It is said that eight masons who went out to work hid in a broken temple to avoid the storm. The thunder outside was like a burst, and one fireball after another rolled around outside the temple gate, and there seemed to be a creaking dragon cry in the air. The crowd was terrified, and their faces were earth-colored. One person said, "Of the eight of us, some of us must have done bad things that hurt heaven and nature." Whoever has done something bad, go out of the temple and be punished, so as not to implicate the good people. "Naturally no one wants to go out. Another person proposed: "Since everyone does not want to go out, then we will throw our straw hats out, and whoever has their straw hats scraped out of the temple door means that whoever has done something bad will go out to be punished." So everyone threw the straw hat, and one of the people's straw hats was rolled out. Everyone urged this man to go out and be punished, but he naturally did not want to, so the people lifted him up and threw him out of the temple gate. Mo Yan said that the ending of the story I guessed everyone guessed: that person had just been thrown out of the temple gate, and the broken temple collapsed violently.
Han Shaogong
This reminds me of some of the words of the Japanese scholars Naoko Kondo and Miyuki Kato. They talked about the C cub of Han Shaogong's "Daddy and Daddy", saying that "human beings live in an organized group, and there is potential cruelty in this way of survival"; characters like C cubs and A Q are all outliers in the "collective", and when "a collective faces a crisis, it dedicates the alien to the outside world or excludes it from the collective". Wasn't the mason who was thrown out of the temple "created" and "discriminated against" because of the crisis, and excluded from the collective? I believe that this interpretation is very different from what students hear in class. Of course, this cannot replace the traditional interpretation of the "A Q Canon", but it can at least become a reference. Constantly creating "outliers" and throwing out "outliers" in the face of crises is a fact that we often face in our lives. One of the consequences is that, as Teacher Zhao Yuan said, "hostility". Teacher Zhao Yuan studied modern and contemporary literature in the 1980s, and later turned to the history of Ming and Qing thought, examining the social situation and literati mentality of that period. She said that at the time of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the social atmosphere and the mentality of the scholars were generally filled with a kind of "hostile atmosphere" - extreme, harsh, violent, resentful, a kind of pathological passion. If you are interested, you can read her book "Research on Scholars and Doctors in the Ming and Qing Dynasties".
Another suggestion is that professional and non-professional books are sometimes not so clearly distinguished. Now it is often said that cross-border vision and cross-border research are to break the narrow limits of "professionalism". When I was in Taipei last year, by chance, someone gave me a book that had just been published by the National Taiwan University Press Center, Professor Tsai Chun-jia's Alternative Reading: Brain Diseases and Sound Abnormalities in the Performing Arts.
Alternative Listening: Brain Disorders and Sound Abnormalities in the Performing Arts, no simplified version available
From his academic background, you can roughly know his "crossover". He received his bachelor's degree in physics from National Taiwan University, then his master's degree from the Institute of Research at Taipei University of the Arts, his phD in music at heidelberg University in Berlin, and after returning to Taiwan, he became a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Applied Mechanics at the National Taiwan University of Technology and the Department of Otorhinolaryngology at the National Taiwan University School of Medicine. His fields of study involve opera, music, biological musicology, psychoacoustics, and musical acoustics, and it is amazing that a person can step into fields that seem completely different. The people who wrote the preface to his book were mainly celebrities in Taiwan's medical circles. When discussing the relationship between artistic creation, especially performance and brain disease, he analyzed these two "cases".
One is the performance of Sun Wukong on the stage, he said that The actions of Sun Wukong are a manifestation of a disease. Sun Wukong's performance shows the symptoms of "Tourette's disease" in medicine. "Tourette" was named after a French medical scientist in the 19th century who discovered the disease. People with this condition will have involuntary movements, including facial convulsions, constant blinking, pouting, grimace, distorted face and shrugging shoulders, shaking their heads and screaming. He said that Sun Wukong's performance was entirely a symptom of "Tourette's disease." Then he analyzed the love story of Du Liniang and Liu Mengmei in "Peony Pavilion". When I was in college, I usually said that "Peony Pavilion" showed "personality liberation", an emotional challenge to the confinement of science. From the perspective of medicine and disease, Cai Zhenjia believes that Du Liniang is suffering from a disease called "bipolar disorder". "Bipolar disorder" should be psychological, mental illness, caused by psychological disorders and emotional disorders, melancholy and mania two characteristics appear repeatedly, manic when happy to the extreme, see the blossoming, there is a very happy feeling, and easy to have a sexual fantasy, full of vitality, mouth hanging, quick thinking. For modern people, another sign of mania is blind shopping, but Du Liniang's era of shopping consumption is not yet developed, when depressed, feel that they are going to die, feel that life has no meaning. Cai Zhenjia said that Du Liniang's performance in "Peony Pavilion" is very consistent with this symptom. Isn't it written in the work that she "visited the garden to admire the flowers, touched the mood, and then searched for dreams, so she died"? This is the typical history of bipolar disorder. "Miss One Night was anxious, got up to promote water and makeup, and she said to herself..." Tsai Zhenjia also cited the self-statement of a bipolar patient in Taiwan after she recovered to prove it.
When I read this book, I felt a little frustrated, it turned out that the beautiful characters in our book were mentally abnormal and brain disease patients. But in retrospect, his research also inspired us a lot. We often talk about "art from life", these examples are not "from life"? What's there to complain about? But "art" is really not "life." The reason we need literature and art is because it has a transcendence, whether it is suffering or actual living conditions. After reading "Alternative Reading and Listening", although I feel that the creativity of literature and art has been degraded, I realize the importance of literary and artistic creation. What people need is their kind of meaning that transcends concrete life situations.
We all know that there are many people who study the relationship between STDs and musicians' creation. This is a bit of a bad thing to say, because these musicians, including Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, Paganini, etc., are all me, and probably your favorite. Music, especially instrumental works, is very indirectly related to our specific life situations, and has a kind of spiritual "purity". But hearing that these composers were venereal sufferers, the "aura" on their heads dimmed. However, Cai Zhenjia and other researchers believe that from the perspective of medical research, strene diseases will produce an illusion when it occurs, which will have a certain effect and meaning on artistic creation. There is no need to avoid this question, and there is certainly no need to exaggerate. Outstanding artists are of course talented, but artistic creation is also a very complicated matter, and there is no need to over-romanticize. We can also see from this that it is not that, as the Russian critic Chernyshevsky said, that no art is inferior to the beauty of life; on the contrary, life is inadequate and art is needed.
Calm down and read a book
Reading is about helping us understand ourselves and helping us understand others. My suggestion is that people read a little more.
Our society is an impetuous society, as some people say, China's "high-speed train" has started, and it seems that it cannot be stopped. In such an exaggerated situation, the most valuable thing is to get a relatively calm mood and calm down to read a book. From the inside, we should experience the truth expressed by others, review our own experience, and improve our own realm.
This article is excerpted from
My Reading History
Author: Hong Zicheng
Publisher: Beijing Publishing House
Publication year: 2017-5