With the 11th National Literary Congress and the 10th National Writers' Congress held from 14 to 17, the five-year literary event came as scheduled. Since the Ninth National Congress, the majority of writers have adhered to the people-centered creative orientation and created many excellent works that reflect the voice of the times, take root in real life, carry forward the Chinese spirit, and stimulate cultural self-confidence. Recently, a series of articles with a set of keywords of "five years of literature" shared the elaborations of writers and critics on topics such as rural revitalization, ecological civilization, literary newcomers, and cross-border innovation, and opened up important phenomena and issues that have been active in the literary world in the past five years.
The convening of the Tenth National Congress is an important moment to stand at the historical node of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China and start a new journey of comprehensively building a modern socialist country. The literary interface is the new expectation of the people's spiritual and cultural life, the "great one of the country", the new pattern of building a community with a shared future for mankind, and the power of literature to contribute to the realization of the Chinese nation's great rejuvenation of the Chinese dream, and many new issues and new ideas leading the future development of the literary circle will sprout and grow here.
To this end, the latest special issue of this newspaper invites cheng Xiaoying, Chen Danyan, Sun Huifen, Ge Pingping, Wei Ling, Zhang Qingguo, Zhang Li, Li Denan, eight writers and critics to tell the resonance of literature and the times, tell Chinese stories well, youth spirit and other topics from different angles, and convey the vast voice range and forward power of "literature, speaking here".
When the world changes dramatically
Text /
Chen Danyan
The travel writer is born to be the dove that is released to observe the world, and whether it can bring back an olive branch determines whether people will leave the refuge and return to the world.
Looking back on the days around the Spring Festival in 2020, I can't help but feel the atmosphere of a Soviet film depicting the outbreak of World War II. In the movie, there's a sunny seashore, someone lying on a big towel basking in the sun, someone far away, a fierce man stuck in the water, someone reading a novel in the shadow of a parasol, looking at that thickness, maybe War and Peace. Then, far away, I saw a row of planes rumbling over, flying low, with a vulture-like gloom. People were upset and confused, and someone stood up and read the novel and put down the book. The plane got closer and closer, and it flew lower and lower, and then a series of black things fell from the plane, which were bombs. This is war.
War always comes when ordinary people are just out of control.
People on the beach fled in all directions, instinctively avoiding bombs. The faces of the people who came to the camera still carried the leisure brought by the beach and the water, but the panic had changed the smile on their faces.
Around the Spring Festival in 2020, the new crown virus struck. In retrospect, this was a world war, but it wasn't a fight between people, but a war between people and the virus.
As at the beginning of the Second World War, it was thought that in a few months it would be known and life would go on. But the truth is much more cruel. When the war with COVID-19 begins in 2020, everyone thinks it will end in the summer. So, the travel plan for 2020, I always thought it was just a postponement, but it wasn't.
Throughout 2020, 2021, the whole world is full of the sound of closing doors – a flat world quickly becomes round.
Many people have regained the habit of reading, including me. In my personal experience, travel books that sprung up in bookstores around 2010 were all but gone, airstrips around the world were filled with large passenger planes, and large airports around the world became more empty than football stadiums, and non-essential travel was the first to be halted during this period. Tourist visas are suspended.
Thus, for the first time, I learned that the travel writer's trip is also typical of "non-essential travel".
Chen Danyan has recently been busy with the documentary "The Direction of Savoy's Flow"
I am a travel writer. The work I do is one of the oldest classifications in the literary genre. This work is to see the world, and then describe the world you witness, and express your feelings about the world. In the time of Sappho, she wrote about the road of seeing; in the time of Homer, he expressed the "sea of grapes and purples" he saw when he roamed; in the time of Xu Xiake, he depicted the lofty mountains far away from Jiangnan; in the era of Kipling, he described the tropical dark jungle. In an era when there was no television in the world, the notes of explorers were also great travel works, Darwin wrote a diary of the Beagle's voyage, Amundsen brought the story of the expedition to the polar regions, and then to Montaigne's trip to Italy, he turned tour of tour into a word used all over the world today, representing the act of travel.
It seems to me that the travel writer is born to be the dove that is released to observe the world, and whether it can bring back an olive branch determines whether people want to leave the refuge and return to the world.
Chen Danyan's "Shanghai Seven Steps"
At a time of pandemic, I had a Literary Conversation with a Spanish Travel Writer about each other's daily lives of being forced to stop traveling. I mentioned the birds chirping in the city. When the park was also closed, I passed by the park near my house, and I could hear the birds, which was a different call from usual, and I could hear the confidence, freedom and carefreeness of the birds, and their throats became healthy. The Spanish writer went on to say, "Have you noticed that their voices have become lighter and softer?" That's because they don't need to compete with the noise made by humans. He measured it himself. That day, we carefully discussed the birds we heard on the streets near our homes and the significance of the sound.
I think that even if the travel writer no longer discovers the world and no longer undertakes the mission of conveying the greatness of geography to his readers, he will still be the first messenger of human beings to fly to the unknown world and explore it with their bodies when they face a world that has changed dramatically. The ancient mission of travel literature still shines with the fatalistic glow of its vocation.
No matter what the world becomes, I still want to see it. That's my idea.
New Media Editor: Zheng Zhouming
Image: Courtesy of the author
Autumn Cultural Creation and 2022 subscription has been opened
Enter the micro-store to order cultural creation
The first batch of cultural and creative online in autumn is limited to 100 copies
Newspaper subscriptions to online channels
China Post Platform
→
This newspaper is a weekly newspaper, published on Thursdays, sent through the post office, postal code 3-22, the annual order price of 61.8 yuan
Tips to meet with us on time every day: