It's been thirty years since The Journey of Culture was published. Today's edition is of a commemorative nature.
For thirty years, the number of prints of this book is really impossible to count. Oriental Publishing Center, CITIC Publishing House, Zhonghua Bookstore, Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House, Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House, Shandong Education Publishing House and many other publishing institutions have successively appeared. Writers Publishing House intervened in the book late, as if it was more than twenty years after the first edition, and it was reasonable that Gao Bo had passed, but it also quickly awarded me the "Super Bestseller Commemorative Trophy" for the 4.5 million copies of the "Cultural Journey" series. In fact, this is just talking about formal channels. Interestingly, there are often important people who come up with books that I have long read and asked me to sign, and when I look at them, almost all of them are pirated. According to the investigation, the pirated version of the book is a full eighteen times that of the original version.
With such a large readership, I am deeply proud to be a Chinese writer. The dark eyes of the sea and stars stared at the Chinese characters flowing out of his pen, which was a grand scene that could not be imagined by the writers of other words in the world.
But this pride is linked to a psychological indebtedness: I have never told the reader the "back story" of the book. In the past, it was always believed that the text was everything, and that things other than the text, no matter how important, should only be hidden in the author's heart. Now that I see the extraordinary enthusiasm of generations of readers, I know that I don't have to be so reserved. Those important "backstory stories" are actually part of "Cultural Journey", and many readers may be willing to listen to them.
The "backstory" can be told in three paragraphs.
The first paragraph: a painstaking journey
When I was young, I underwent a drastic turn in social thought. First, in the face of a long period of ultra-left closure, I ventured to write a series of books on the world's humanities to confront it. This large-scale basic project received high social evaluation in the early days of reform and opening up, and I was elected as the dean of the Shanghai Theater Academy and the chairman of the doctoral defense committee of several famous universities. Originally, I could have continued the scenery in such a position, and the day was peaceful, but I encountered a spiritual rift.
It turned out that reform and opening up had triggered a comprehensive contrastive reflection, and China at that time was indeed still poor, and the scars left by political movements could be seen at any time. Under these circumstances, certain communities at home and abroad have made overall doubts about Chinese culture, and the arguments such as "ugly Chinese" and "inferior roots of the nation" are constantly heard.
Reflection is necessary, and it's normal to say something too much. But when the object of derogation expands into a large whole, it violates my basic rationale for macroscopic thinking about world culture.
It was then that I read what the British philosopher Bertrand Russell had to say about China. Russell visited China in the early 1920s, when China was bullied and dilapidated, and there was no hope in sight. But the philosopher said:
Progress and efficiency make us rich and strong, but they are ignored by Chinese. But before we harassed them, they were still in the country.
Caucasians have a strong desire to dominate others, but Chinese have virtues that do not want to rule over other countries. It is this virtue that makes China appear weak internationally. In fact, if there is a country in the world that is too proud to bother to fight, that country is China. If China wants to, it can become the most powerful nation in the world.
Whether it is China or the world, culture is the most important. As long as the cultural problem can be solved, no matter what kind of political system and economic system China adopts, I will accept it.
To be honest, I was a bit sour when I read "Before we harassed them, they were still in Guotai Min'an". Because this judgment comes precisely from the country that launched the Opium War against China, this argument re-depicts the world map.
In fact, Russell did not know much about Chinese history, but he showed such a fair insight. This attitude has a huge allure, urging me to do something for my culture.
Therefore, I decided to get rid of my existing honorary position, resigned twenty-three times and finally succeeded, and came to the Gansu Plateau alone. At that time, the declared purpose was to "travel through a hundred years of blood and tears and find a thousand years of glory", but my inner goal was even more difficult, that is, to let Chinese find a "collective identity". This was not done by the fighters of the May Fourth New Culture Movement, thus making the movement inferior to the European Renaissance.
If possible, I would also like to ponder the question in the context of cultural investigation, why did Russell say, "If China wants to, it can become the most powerful nation in the world"?
To convince oneself and others, the reasons must be emotional, concrete, and widely persuasive, and not deceive themselves with clichés and big words. So I walked alone in the desert in search of great sites. And, first of all, it must be a cultural site, because Russell said, "Culture is the most important."
Looking for ruins is like pulling groups of people who don't trust us to the scene where things have happened, using the real scene, the real scene, the real track, so that they can't help but stop.
Most of the ruins must have been deserted, adding to the sadness of the past greatness. The greatness of pathos is even greater because they carry the weight of history.
I will weigh between greatness and compassion to see which sites still make today's Chinese heart-warming.
At that time, most of my peers were crowded at the gates of going abroad, promoting, and going to the sea, but I turned my back and became a "retrograde", wearing a thin cotton jacket and a pair of old rubber shoes, and searching in the desert.
Finally, in a small country hotel, I began to write with a ballpoint pen with a bamboo pole. Some of today's readers are very familiar with it, and most of the readers at that time were unfamiliar with place names, such as Dujiangyan, Mingshashan, Kashgar in the Western Region, LongquanFu in Shangjing, Chibi in Huangzhou, Qingyunpu, Chengde Mountain Villa, Ninggu Pagoda, Pingyao Ticket Number, Tianyi Pavilion, Xijiang Miaozhai, etc., all solemnly appeared in my pen.
Subsequently, the baishui culture, the grotto culture, the western culture, the foreign culture, the Wei and Jin culture, the exile culture, the Jin shang culture, the book collection culture, the imperial examination culture, the dilemma culture, the ruin culture, and so on, were also outlined one by one. In connection with these cultures, I respectfully invited many ethereal figures.
These places, these cultures, these figures, although they have been discussed in historical records before, have hardly been fully described. In other words, I completed a "cultural stepping point" in the sense of a first. These points buried the spiritual acupuncture points of the Chinese nation.
In my search for these points, I tend to frown and cry. I believe that most Chinese readers will also have similar psychological reactions, so I use a poetic style of spiritual dialogue when writing. Only poetry can bring history, sites, authors, and readers together into a realm of beauty that is inseparable.
This brings us to the second paragraph of "Behind the Story": Unexpected Surprises.
When these articles, written in the inn, were published under the title "Cultural Journey", they formed a far unexpected sensation. The astonishing print volume mentioned above still refers to the mainland, and what is even more surprising is the extraordinary enthusiasm of the global Chinese-speaking world.
In particular, the Taiwan region still had many estrangements from the mainland at that time, but this book crossed all the barriers. According to the famous poet, "Cultural Journey" entered "every household on the island" as quickly as possible. The articles in "Cultural Journey" were also included in local textbooks, which was an unprecedented breakthrough for mainland authors. Among young people, a fashion has arisen called "go to the green light coffee house to listen to Bach read Yu Qiuyu", and a group of Taiwanese writers have published monographs under the title of the book.
Mr. Bai Yang, who wrote the book "The Ugly Chinese", met me in Taipei, and when I saw him, he said: "Two words, envy." Envy you for your large-scale investigation of cultural monuments, redefining the Chinese. ”
In addition to Taiwan, some Chinese communities around the world have also invited me to give lectures again and again, and each session has been overcrowded. Mr Lee Kuan Yew said that in the late twentieth century, overseas Chinese were once again moved by Chinese culture, mainly because of this book.
These grand occasions did not make me proud, but they made me strongly feel the psychological hunger and thirst of Chinese people everywhere. They originally had a lot of books to read, but they had been looking forward to someone who could use thousands of years of empirical evidence to evoke the dignity of survival buried in their hearts. And this dignity of existence is a culture that can transcend all kinds of barriers.
So I knew what to do next. I was invited to give a speech on "The Non-Aggressive Nature of Chinese Culture" at the United Nations Conference on World Civilization held in Tokyo, and "The Eight Longevity Genes of Chinese Culture" at the United Nations Headquarters Building in New York. These speeches caused a sensation and even became the "first news" of the United Nations website.
Such momentum is bound to offend some international force, so there is the third paragraph of the "back story": the storm comes and goes.
Allowing Chinese people around the world to find a common "spiritual site" is simply a slap in the bucket for those who make a living from antagonism. Therefore, such a gentle prose book became a stumbling block for them.
However, it is difficult to directly negate a literary work that everyone likes, and the only way is to avoid the work, create rumors, form a storm, and bury the work. This is their familiar professionalism.
The initiator is a political figure who is still active in the United States.
The leader is Hong Kong's Apple Daily. The newspaper did not publicly present its identity until May 2009.
The implementers were a newspaper in Guangzhou and a group of elderly people. These old people are almost all the heroes of the ten years of civil strife. Choosing them is really a painstaking effort of the dominant ones. Because they just want to take advantage of people's old memory loss and whitewash their history by planting booty, and their only specialty is to throw dirt on the media. This kind of "reversal of celebrities" battle is very attractive to readers, and the momentum is not small, and I have become a "controversial figure" as they wish, attracting attention at home and abroad.
However, as early as the beginning of the storm, the famous Hong Kong writer Ni Kuang said: "Even if it is like this, "Cultural Journey" is still "Cultural Journey". ”
Zhang Wuchang, a well-known Economist in Hong Kong, also published a long article stating the same meaning.
The storm has finally passed, all the rumors have been destroyed, and no one can remember a sentence and a half. My "problem" is left with only that origin: writing "Cultural Journey". But I and this book are still standing.
There are many reasons for this, and I just want to highlight two of them -
One, ugliness is never an opponent of beauty. When I wrote this book, I always pursued a quiet and profound oriental beauty, and those defamatory articles always avoided a kind of cynical ugliness. Lang Lang Tiandao, the small heart, will eventually stand on the side of beauty.
"Cultural Journey" has proved that the beauty I want can only arise from the exploration and creation of individual life in the long heavens and the earth. The whole process should avoid entanglement with ugliness. Because a entanglement will detract from the individual's life, fade the heavens and the earth, even if it does not yield to ugliness, it will fall into mediocrity.
Second, after so many years, Chinese culture has been able to defy all insults. The era, which even one considers "ugly" by oneself, is largely over. This is also the background of the storm finally passing.
After experiencing this storm, I understand even more that interpreting Chinese culture is the top priority in today's world. Therefore, he risked his life to investigate the ruins of major ancient cultures of mankind to compare with Chinese culture, and wrote works such as "A Sigh of a Thousand Years" and "Walkers Without Frontiers". Then, he systematically analyzed the Chinese cultural canon with international concepts and modern concepts, and wrote a whole set of "infrastructure- and" academic works, each of which still sold well on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. All of this is the follow-up footprint of "Cultural Journey".
When I traveled to find the footprints of ancient times, I have to look for the footprints of that year again.
This book is the footprint of thirty years ago.
Suddenly I remembered a few poems I had written, related to these footprints—
In fact, the road of my life has come this way.
Ugly year autumn moon