Classmates and teenagers are not cheap| Tang Xiaobing

Yuelu Academy/Xinhua News Agency

I've been teaching in college for more than a decade, and looking at the students who are busy and anxious every day, I often think of our bland and free college days. Compared with the lives of a generation of young people who are "inner volumes" today, our youth memories have shown a sparkling style in the long river of time. In the summer of 2008, I wrote in the article "The Past and Present Life of Changsha Fallen Street" published in "South Wind Window" and expounded the cultural characteristics of my alma mater, Hunan University, with deep affection, "The traditional Confucian culture represented by Yuelu Academy, the natural culture represented by Yuelu Mountain and Xiangjiang, the revolutionary culture linked by Dongfanghong Square, and the secular culture and bohemian culture of the impending metaphor of Fallen Street are precisely the four spiritual elements of Hunan University that exist in the same space, constructing the complex and diverse qualities and dispositions of Hu darens." Students can move freely in their daily lives and in these four cultural spaces, diving back and forth. "In retrospect, the unique geographical environment and cultural traditions of such a university are indeed unique in China's university landscape.

At that time, Hunan University, which was at the turn of the century, did not have a grade point system in which points must be contested, nor did it have a fierce competition for research and evaluation. The whole society is relatively open and diverse, the campus is basically the world of paper publications, and the off-campus is the golden age of paper media with the rise of China Youth Daily, Southern Weekend, and Southern Metropolis Daily. As journalism students, my classmates and I are passionate about reading newspapers and periodicals, learning new things, and eager to try to make a difference on campus. Ye Tieqiao, a roommate at the time, also successfully lobbied our dormitory to order a copy of China Youth Daily together. He read most carefully, and his annotations were often written on The Freezing Point Weekly. He was able to count the works and writing styles of every good journalist, and naturally he was full of expectations for the newspaper, and finally turned his dream around and became a well-known investigative reporter for the newspaper. In the pre-Internet era of university campuses, our courses are not much, basically no classes in the afternoon, and there is no memory of class in the evening, except for a few students to do tutoring on weekends, other students have a lot of time to squander, and our youth seems to be used to freely swing. Compared with the tension and anxiety of high school, most of us in college have a relaxed and stretched attitude, and "sixty long live" has become the tacit understanding of most boys. It's such a pleasant thing to realize that you finally have some time to do something that interests you and explore the spiritual world of yourself!

The historian Mr. Fosnian once said that only twenty-one hours a day should be used for work, study, or rest, and the other three hours should be used for contemplation or daze. Perhaps because life has not yet been tied down or dominated by electronics, and there are not so many courses, assignments, or science and technology projects to complete, we have a lot of time to spend in a daze, making friends, doodling or playing. At that time, Hunan University still had a bit of the afterglow of the Enlightenment era in the 1980s, although it was mainly a science and engineering university, but each department had some whimsical and maverick literary and artistic youth, some would also create some mimeographed publications, even the school logistics department had student publications, the more well-known and influential is the school magazine "Huda Youth" and the "Red Maple" magazine held by the Department of Journalism, we have a dormitory out of the editor-in-chief of two publications, constituting a relationship of internal competition and cooperation. In addition to studying, if you want to live close to nature, you can climb Yuelu Mountain in the early morning or evening or even late at night, and enjoy the pleasure of "being at the top of the mountain and seeing Changsha City". Or stop at the Aiwan Pavilion in the middle of the way, in the best season - autumn to watch the beauty of "parking and sitting in love maple forest night, frost leaves red in February flowers", or you can also wander idly on the shore of the Xiang River at dusk, look at the orange island head in the distance, myopia in the twilight sparkling river, imagine the youth of the Hunan First Division at the beginning of the 20th century to guerrilla water waves to curb the youthful feelings of the flying boat. Life close to nature is in keeping with the nature of young people's lives and the order of their hearts.

If you want to find a sense of meaning to live a life, the Yuelu Academy of Hunan University is the best place to go. I still remember that as soon as the school started, a tall and handsome student sister took our two journalism classmates to visit the academy, and in the deep cultural space of the courtyard, we felt the depth and vastness of history, and even more felt the persistence and promotion of the humanistic tradition of those stoic ancestors in the face of the historical moment of heaven and earth. College has become the most important keyword of our four years of spiritual life in college. Whether it is a serious reading or a leisure meeting, or even just hanging out to relax ourselves, we often choose the academy, especially in the rainy day, the tourists are sparse, the most suitable for a person to roam in the long river of history and culture, and meet and think with the ancient saints and sages. At that time, I liked to go to the back garden of the academy to read and write, often reading gu cheng or Haizi's poetry collections. In countless early mornings or at dusk, I lingered in the courtyard brick by brick, tile by grass and tree, especially in the long corridor inscription, the sentence in the yanglian "is not to judge oneself, reputation is to be heard to others, gain or loss is to count" Affect me deeply and far. Occasionally, I would also meet the poet and writer Jiang Di teacher who was stationed in the academy, but unfortunately I was not familiar with it at that time, I was too timid to go to the teaching, and the "Mountain Courtyard" he wrote was the most insightful and profound collection of essays I had ever read about Yuelu Academy, unfortunately, in the summer of 2003, he died young due to illness, and after attending the memorial service in Changsha, I left Hunan to study in Shanghai. At that time, the academy would occasionally hold cultural forums, and would also cooperate with Hunan Satellite TV, such as Master Nebula, Huang Yongyu and other cultural celebrities who had once given lectures in the place where the famous science scholars Zhu Xi and Zhang Yu would speak, and the courtyard was often a group of guan gaiyun clusters of sages, but unfortunately, at that time, I belonged to the elements on the edge of self-will on campus, and it seemed that I had never been assigned a guest ticket to listen to the high theory on the spot, which was a big regret in the university era.

Nowadays, when I talk to my friends, I often think back to an interesting incident related to the academy at that time. In addition to the intoxicating fragrance of August laurel flowers, Yuelu Academy also has the grapefruit of the Chuanshan Ancestral Hall that is also nostalgic. Whenever the grapefruit is ripe, the boys in the same dormitory go to pick them together, which is actually illegal (although these grapefruits do not have a definite owner, and it is estimated that the final result is also zero mud and dust). I remember once, when we went to steal grapefruit at dusk, between the two grapefruit trees was a stone table, and on the stone chairs next to it sat two girls who were studying on their own. The housemates urged me to persuade the two girls to make room, and I walked over nervously and whispered to them that the dormitory students wanted to hold a reading party here, could they please gently move their jade toes, but their eyes drifted to those grapefruit that gently swayed in the evening wind and emitted fragrance, it was really easy to break the mountain, and it was difficult to break the heart. One of the eccentric girls said directly that the grapefruit they picked would naturally maintain a "noble silence". The seven or eight classmates hiding outside instantly became fat when they heard this, and they ran over and jumped on the stone table, picked up several grapefruits on the light car, and generously picked the largest one for the two girls. Unfortunately, I returned to the dormitory full of anticipation and cut the grapefruit to taste, and everyone jumped up and down with a grin of sour teeth.

The memory of zheng'er bajing class is extremely thin, and the deeper impression is the Intensive English Reading Class. Boys such as me are mostly from the countryside grass, because from the primary school is "deaf and dumb English", the ears can not listen, the mouth can not speak, automatically sit in the back corner of the classroom on the first floor of the forward building to dodge, girls are mostly from Changsha and other cities, they are well-trained in oral language, listening is good, can interact with the teacher, and often chat with the classroom teacher in Changsha dialect between classes. We often have a heart hanging in the classroom, afraid of being named by the teacher for English listening and speaking practice. Once I went to class early, the classroom was empty, I made the ghost send god to sit in the second row that day, not long after a royal sister type of girl led a group of female classmates roaring, glimpsed me sitting in the position of the trespassing, apricot eyes angrily shouted: "Tang Xiaobing, you are sitting in the wrong place!" I was ashamed, my face was red, as if I had made a big mistake, and I packed up my school bag and automatically returned to the back corner of the classroom. Boys once had a popular shaved head, and some boys were attracted by the computer games that were just emerging at the time, skipping class every three to five to play on Fallen Street, so that some male teachers came to count the bald heads as soon as they arrived at the classroom. The Mandarin of the male teachers often bubbled up a little plastic Hunan accent, and also became the object of the students' simulation, and now it is really rude to think about it. Family, social and class divide, looking back today, in fact, an invisible wall was built between classmates, and most of our boys did not argue about reading, belonging to the end of the chain of contempt, so that twenty years after graduating from college this year, some students proposed to hold an online large-scale gathering activity to "reminisce about the past", and almost no one responded. Thinking about the college era, there is almost no common intention and shared friendship, how can we find a spiritual motivation to reunite us after twenty years of washing, breaking through the gaps in family, work and psychology?

The German poet Rilke wrote in Autumn: "Let the last fruits of the branches be full; give two days of good weather in the south, urge them to ripen, and press the last sweetness into the wine." Whoever does not have a house at this time does not have to build it, and whoever is lonely at this time will be lonely forever. "Although There were all kinds of shortcomings and gaps in The students of Qia," after all, it is the youth memory and spiritual life that we jointly shaped at the turn of the century, and the Huda Campus, which has natural landscapes and humanistic traditions, has long been an indelible eternal background in the life memories of Xinxin students. I believe that it will eventually be completely cured of us who are tormented by nostalgia, and the wine of memory will also keep us away from the loneliness of life.

Author: Tang Xiaobing

Editor: Xie Juan

Editor-in-Charge: Shu Ming

*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.