Perhaps, we are just interested in the loneliness of the losers, as Richard Yates did. It is so easy to fail in life, to suddenly shake this marriage when accepting the blessings of others' newlyweds, to be out of place because they care about a job, to put half a fist into their mouths and cry in the empty darkness between visiting their sick husbands and kissing their lovers... Yates's group portrait of the losers may have shared all the loneliness of his own serious illness, war, and parting ways with his wife. If the body is a little weak, the whole person will feel terrible. Any shortcoming in life can define your own failure. At the same time, the people around them, life seems to be so normal, at this moment, as long as you can be like them, do not have to experience the setbacks you are experiencing, you can join them and get rid of loneliness. This is also the cruelty that Yates wants people to feel. He sets up a turning point for light and an exit for escape on the way for the characters to resist loneliness. And in the end, it just makes them feel that all the good things they can only touch.
"Eleven Kinds of Loneliness" depicts the lives of ordinary New Yorkers after World War II. Everyone is like the transfer students in "Dr. Pumpkin Lamp", trying to find their place in an unsuitable environment. Boy Vinnie lies in front of the class and graffiti on the school walls. The head teacher, Miss Price, had given him extra care before, and still with patience, told him to wipe the dirty words off the wall a little bit and told him that I understood your anger. "Dr. Pumpkin Lamp" seems to be about to reconcile with the world, but his lies in front of his classmates that he was beaten up are once again debunked by Miss Price's gentle goodbye when she bumps into them. He did not allow himself to reconcile. Yates had long known that loneliness was his destiny. He returned to the wall, turned the doubling of loneliness and the shame that came with it into anger, drew a crude nude portrait, and wrote Miss Price's name next to it.
I doubt anyone would long for Yates's lonely life. Initially we wanted to recognize each other in the midst of the crowds, like in The Loneliness of Prime Numbers, where Alice was as desperate as she wanted to get close to Mattia, wanted to hold up his face and say, Look, I'm here. But they're so real that those characters come up and we see our faces. The only thing that is different from reality is that we see our own endings together in Yates's novels. We were on the road when we came, and we could only see a short distance ahead illuminated by the headlights, and in the distance was endless darkness.
The Loneliness of Prime Numbers is celebrating its tenth anniversary. This novel, which I bought because of the title of the book, read the content introduction several times, and I can't get more of my own impression from it. Beginning to reread, Childhood Alice wrapped in a thick ski suit, felt the warm urine flow down the river, remained silent before the coach called, and was soon successfully left alone in the fog that would be engulfed in two steps. She slid down the mountain, fell off a cliff, lay in the snow and watched as it got dark... As a child, Mattia left her unintelligent sister in the park, went to her classmates' birthday party alone, and just when she was about to eat cake, she went crazy and wanted to go back to find her, but there was no sister in twilight. He sat by the park pool and wondered why some things would float up and some wouldn't... It was as if I were walking on a road, and I gradually recognized the scenery on both sides.
It can only be eliminated by 1 and oneself, but it is just a representation. The loneliness of prime numbers is that the larger the numbers, the harder it is for them to meet each other. Alice had cheeks scalded and confidently believed that her lonely years were coming to an end. When Mattia walked out of the building with his degree, he also hoped that someone would wait for him there so that he could transfer some of the weight from himself. When he had been away from home for many years, received an old photo from Alice with only "You have to come back" on the back, and immediately flew home for the first time, he needed to summon. Everyone in the story has a hidden lonely side: the maid concocts a widowhood lie because her husband suddenly leaves her; the most fashionable and beautiful girl in Alice's class, who has bullied her, tries to hold the boy who has just gotten up from her body, but is thrown away; Mattia's mother can't bear to look at her son at the dinner table every day, preferring him to go away and fly away... But no one can live alone in a house with no trace of life for several years like Matthia, "ordinary people are afraid that they will go crazy in a month." Only Alice could be like Mattia, who did not hold him back after a brief reunion, nor did she tell him that she wanted him to come back because she had bumped into someone a few days earlier, much like his sister.
Loneliness is the home of prime numbers, and only they can naturally bear and lie dormant in the sense of security that pain brings. The young man who bought this book at that time only projected a fantasy about his lonely temperament on it, amplified his "instinct to run to the abyss and at the same time want to save himself", and whenever he felt rejected by the world, he simply doubled his will to reject the world. Imagine yourself as soft shellfish, like Alice, who grew up lame, dressed in black as her rough shell. Try to find the right seat in each character.
Yuan Zhesheng recalled playing hide-and-seek as a child in "The Lonely Game", saying that he was "curled up in a dark corner, tense nerves... Trapped in a dark happiness, I can't extricate myself." In this "quietest and most beautiful moment," he would snatch candy out of his trouser pocket, peel it in his mouth, and chew on the sweetness of candy. Until one time, he hid in a big tree and waited for a long time, and the feeling of happiness slowly disappeared with time. He saw his best friend appear under the tree, looked up but ignored him, and dragged his feet slowly away. He cried. The posture of hiding has become strange, and the corner of hiding has become lonely.
Ten years ago, I was still able to enjoy the sweetness of actively seeking loneliness, and once loneliness seeped from "above the skin" and "under the skin", I was no longer willing to continue to the innate, complete loneliness that I was not able to bear. They sometimes symbiosis with being discarded and forgotten, and the fun of the game disappears like a "shooting star". The game doesn't work.
However, Yuan Zhesheng also said, "Once people start hiding, it is difficult to stop." When he experienced fear again, he longed again for the lonely corner of the thick tree, unnoticed.
Loneliness is tempting us. It divides us from reality. At several moments, the author seemed to withdraw and saw himself curled up in a tree, or even more, in his imaginary picture, it was Sima Guang who smashed the water tank and shyly saw himself curled up inside. Our confusion, perched in solitude, captures a moment of tranquility. As long as we don't have the energy and desire to fight against our weaknesses, we don't quit the lonely game.
Yuan Zhesheng heard his father say that the student era is a golden age for a person, and he does not dare to imagine how terrible and trembling the future will be if the present is so painful. Unfortunately, he did not meet Haruki Murakami.
Haruki Murakami categorizes people who see it thoroughly as "First Person Singular.". In his unreliable, reminiscent tone, the meaning of facts dissolves, and once there is no relationship between facts and meaning, the weight of loneliness is eliminated. Or, because loneliness no longer carries meaning, we see its form more clearly. The young people in these stories are hardly troubled by loneliness, and they find pleasure in loneliness frankly and sincerely, like the judges. The "first-person singular" can even become a popular identity that most people can identify with to satisfy their inner sense of order. Since I bought this book, I somewhat acquiesced that in the process of constantly hitting a wall, I "gradually lost my power in something similar to my dreams when I was young." Tacitly, between people and people, close to skin to skin, there are also distances that are difficult to cross. If there happens to be the loneliness you're experiencing right now, you can be more optimistic that someone has overcome it.
Many people like the first story "On the Stone Pillow". The girl who worked together, just because she didn't want to go home alone late at night, spent the night with me. Girls leave their own stories and may call out another person's name, you don't mind. Leaving a book of poems and reading her poems, I saw before my eyes the way she had been bathed in the moonlight that day. And that night I didn't hand over anything, except for my own loneliness. The single-point of view narrative makes this thing seem to take place in a vacuum environment, a pure night, and no one's life makes waves. For me, who was ordinary at that time, I didn't expect anything to happen, and it didn't mean anything to life at all. Until I recalled, I didn't even know if she was still alive, and the things that could connect her to her were clearly non-existent. In this collection of novels, Murakami mentions more than once the non-existent connection between the two. The lost imagination of youth, the sentimental nourishment needed when you are young, are interpreted as "accidental coincidences" that run through the entire short story collection. Not a coincidence that Paul Oster fully trusted, but something like a chitan—he met The Shinagawa Monkey who appeared in tokyo Inquisitives and was collecting the names of his beloved women; he saw a record he had made up in a record store and couldn't find it when he looked for it—only this time, and he couldn't find any coincidences related to himself.
These stories are confusing, and some people may be suspicious and hope that one day they will have such a lonely adventure. But as soon as the story is over, the loneliness is left there, and we just have to follow Murakami and wake up from it with ease. Use it like a solitude manual, not to be narrow in loneliness, or even to feel free in loneliness.
But loneliness is complicated. Richard Yates believes that loneliness is a tragedy for man, because life has never been kind to him. But we may be kind to each other.