□ Su Chen
One
In the corner of our nursing home compound, there used to be a small forest dominated by phoenix wood. My morning fortune is that as long as it is not windy and rainy, I walk around the nursing home compound 3 times, and every time I walk around, I will rest in front of this small forest.
Phoenix Wood, a distant visitor from black Africa, seems to have a little "relationship" with me. In April 1954, I transferred from the army and settled in Guangzhou. The first residence was on the hill on The Little North Dengying Road. Before the liberation of Guangzhou, it was the "salt office" of the Kuomintang regime. The four alleys below the hill, collectively known as "Zhanjia Lane", are the places where the Nanjing Guozi supervised the sacrifice of wine, officials, rites, and soldiers during the Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty, or the place where the Dali scholar Zhan Ruoshui, who was famous at home and abroad as "Wang Zhan Lixue" (Wang Zhi Wang Yangming), moved to and gave lectures at the "Tianguan Jingshe" after returning to his hometown.
The story of "Tianguan Sihao" is so touching! Elder Jian was 102 years old and came to study from Zhan Ruoshui, so as not to inspire people... But it is "past tense". The reality that left the deepest impression on me was that I lived in the first room on the third floor, pushed the window, and reached out of the seven or eight tall phoenix trees that grew up from the bottom of the hill. The flowers are in full bloom, the red is brilliant, and gradually tilts down, like a waterfall of flowers, beautiful!
Should the nursing home be my last residence in Guangzhou? Thinking about the small forest in the courtyard that was dominated by phoenix wood two years ago, thinking that the phoenix wood was visible in my residence from beginning to end, I really thought that it had some "relationship" with me. Later, the phoenix wood was removed, and the place was vacated to build a house, what about the "edge"?
In the past, when I woke up in the morning, I always heard the thrush sound of "good birds and branches and friends" in the small tree, but now they are far away, a little lost. The thrush is pleasant, the image is beautiful, and the personality is also loved, and he is voted as a "city bird" by the citizens of Guangzhou. In my opinion, it is not only Guangzhounese, it seems that Cantonese people generally have a good feeling for thrush. For example, Qu Dajun, a great scholar of Guangdong in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, held the title of thrush in his famous book "Guangdong Xinyu" volume 20 "Bird Language":
The two eyebrows are particularly white, and those whose eyebrows are long and not chaotic are good at singing, and those with short chest hair are good at fighting.
Hi-mountain perch, self-adjust its voice, corresponding to the rock to entertain itself.
Especially good at turning the voice, turning endlessly, like a hundred tongues.
Wengyuan has a thrush village, named after many thrush birds, and it is also expensive. From Huazhou to Shicheng, all the way to the forest valley, thrush especially many, Yu Zeng, there is a poem: "Wildflowers are full of smiles, mountain birds thrushes are more..."
Two
I woke up early on this day, and when I saw the dawn, I had to squint for a while. In the haze, I thought of the "sleep" that I had just woken up for no reason. There are people who work during the day is an expense, and sleep at night is a supplement. In order to maintain the continuation of life, people spend a long time in sleep in their lives. People who are disease-free and disaster-free will think of going to sleep when they are blind, and they will wake up naturally after sleeping enough. It's just that young people mostly sleep more deeply, and the elderly mostly sleep lighter. In particular, those of us who are "post-90s" "nursing home academicians" sleep especially lightly. In me, I was awakened every day by the cry of the thrush, and the cry of the thrush was no longer there, and I missed it quite a bit.
Regarding sleep, I remember that there is a more scientific definition of:
Sleep is a spontaneous, reversible resting state that occurs during the higher vertebrate cycle and manifests itself as a decrease in responsiveness to external stimuli.
My thinking habits, according to my hometown Liaodong dialect called "wild", particularly restless, this is not, is talking about under normal circumstances people are indispensable to sleep every day, suddenly and for no reason thought of the ideology of people, will also enter the "sleep state" of unconsciousness. This is because I have noticed that the old man, the old lady, who lives in the nursing home and is commonly referred to as the "elderly", from the appearance, is far from the older, and must be "old" than the younger, often the opposite can be seen, especially in the mental state or temperament.
I have been a journalist, a little bit of "skill", in the intentional exploration of the conversation, the ability to use "clichés", the result is to make me more convinced that ideological sobriety and unconsciousness, in people's "natural rings", do have a certain reaction.
The world-renowned Japanese writer Haruki Murakami also said:
I have always thought that people grow old slowly, but in fact, they are not, people become old in an instant... People's aging does not start from the first wrinkle, the first white hair, but from the moment of "giving up on the self", only those who do not give up on themselves can live without getting old, only aging is age, not old is temperament...
Coincidentally, a few days later, Song Qun, a retired veteran comrade-in-arms who lived in Beijing and ran a newspaper all his life, forwarded to me from the computer an Israeli fable story that he did not know where he got it: "After death, I knew who the murderer was." I can see this story and explain that Murakami's "giving up on self" is not just going to make people "old"!
Three
This is a story with text, pictures, noses and eyes, but it is a pity that it is longer and should not be recorded, nor should it be recorded. Anyway, I am giving an example of saying things, just "fishing dry", briefly described, that is:
There was a young Israelite brother who at first just felt an itch in his left ear. His wife looked, and there was a little red dot, telling him to hurry up and see the doctor.
He hurried to see a doctor. The doctor said, "You'll be fine if you take 6 penicillin tablets." He did, and it was fine in two days.
However, the abdomen was red spots, and the itch was even more unbearable. He went to the doctor again. The doctor said: "Some people are not suitable for penicillin and will be allergic. You take 12 chlortetracycline pills and you'll be fine after a few days. He did so, and a few days later the erythema disappeared.
This time it was a puffy knee and a high fever. He hurried to see the doctor again. "This phenomenon is often associated with the efficacy of chlortetracycline," the doctor said. "The doctor gave him 32 oxytetracycline pills for him to take. After taking it, the high fever subsided, and his knees swelled, but his kidneys hurt terribly.
He was admitted to the hospital. The doctor said to him: "This is the result of taking oxytetracycline. The kidneys are vital organs and must not be taken seriously. So the nurse injected him with 64 shots of chlortetracycline, saying that he wanted to eliminate all the bacteria in his body.
After that, although the bacteria in his body were destroyed, the trouble was that the muscles and nerve beams were also damaged at the same time! The doctor added: "This can only save lives by taking large doses of chloramphenicol." ”
He took a lot of chloramphenicol. But his life was still not saved!
Hold his funeral. In his eulogy, the Jewish master praised in touching language his "tenacious struggle" with the disease. It was only when he got to Hades that he learned that his left ear was itching, but he had just given a mosquito a bite...
This means that, in the extreme sense, the real murderer who wanted his life was allowed to be manipulated by "authority", without self-awareness, or in a "sleeping state" of ideology, that is, what Murakami called "giving up on self"!
Four
At this time, the "wildness" of my thinking habits flare up again, this time jumping again, thinking that those of us who burn the last candle head of life, in the last days, seem to have to guard against a little unconscious "giving up on ourselves".
Santayana said in Prison Dialogue:
The years have stolen our youth, and the age of man cannot be changed. But why be so concerned about the inevitable stages that nature has drawn in our lives!
Montaigne also said in Caprice:
Old age is the pinnacle of life, like the climax of a drama.
Amiel said in his Diary:
Knowing how to mature in old age is a masterpiece of wisdom and the most difficult chapter in life skills.
This seems to be saying that we candle heads that have been in the wind and candle for many years must not "give up ourselves", and still have to look at the world outside the gate of the nursing home, because the society is all-encompassing, the exciting world, the surging social trend, only when we use positive thinking to take the initiative to connect them, can we not feel wandering, lonely, lonely, ideology will not fall into a "sleeping state", the spirit will not lose the excitement of big things, that is, to achieve "old age is age, not old is temperament".
The philosophers said:
Spirit is the air of the soul.
The soul gives meaning to itself by the spirit.
It seems that those of us "nursing home academicians", who burn the last candle head of life, walk a road at the end of life, and really have to seriously grasp this important topic of life philosophy.
A few days ago, I saw Xu Yuanchong, a 96-year-old translator on the computer, who was the first person in Asia to win the "Northern Lights Literary Translation Award", the world's highest award in the translation industry, in 2014. The host lady introduced him to everyone, and he took out a business card and gave it to the host lady. She read the business card printed on the business card to everyone: "The book has sold more than 100 copies at home and abroad, and the first person to translate poetry into English and France." Here I would like to insert a few words: it should be "more than 100 kinds of books sold at home and abroad", "more than 100 books sold at home and abroad" are more than thousands, and what he translated into English and French is still difficult to translate ancient Chinese poems and ancient songs. "The first person to translate poetry into English and France" refers to the fact that he was the first to translate difficult ancient Chinese poems into English and French more than 60 years ago in 1958. What moved me the most at that time was that he was 96 years old, still stubbornly competing with the god of death, working every day until two or three o'clock in the second half of the night to sleep, vowing to translate all of Shakespeare's works.
This reminds me of what I can't remember reading there: "The more people feel that life is short and there is not much time, the more time they will have." That means: people feel that time is urgent, the opportunity must not be lost, the time will not come again, they will grab the time out of the water, but also to concentrate on the urgent, necessary things, often more calm, witty, decisive, in order to obtain time more effectively, which objectively becomes the delivery bed of efficiency.
I believe this, over 90 years old this life is a big hurdle, "chat hair juvenile madness" secretly tried it, but also a small witch, before and after two years to complete 6 books each more than 200,000 words of manuscripts, has been published two, is being published one after another.
Man walks on the journey of life, and whenever there is a hope covering his head, he will walk smoothly. Distant thrush, please believe me, without yours let me "smell the birds dancing", I will continue to work hard!
(92 years old in the South China Sea Dali Bi Chong Village Tai Cheng YiYuan nursing home.) ）
□ Su Chen, born in 1930, is a famous writer and publisher.