Kant said: There are two things in the world that can deeply shake people's hearts, one is the lofty moral code in our hearts, and the other is the brilliant starry sky above our heads.
In addition to the stars shining overhead, there will also be brilliant times in human history, and Stephen Zweig, the best biographer in human history, "When the Stars Shine" composes an interesting book through 14 separate chapters of legends, which, as critics say, is a magical work mixed with various elements such as humor, humor, historical facts, legend, absurdity and fate.
The author of this book, Zweig, came from a wealthy Jewish family, was a novelist, poet, playwright and biographer, and wrote a rich life, representative works such as "Letter from a Strange Woman", "Anxiety of the Heart", "Yesterday's World", etc. He wrote about the brilliance of the human stars, but his life was turbulent, and he was expelled by the Nazis in 1934 and exiled to England and Brazil. He committed suicide in Brazil in 1942. The stars of humanity will mourn for him.
The book consists of 14 chapters that cannot be expressed one by one, and through a few simple chapters, it tries to see the interesting aspects of history, as pointed out in "The Source of History":
Human beings make their own history, but not as they please. They make history not in the circumstances of their own choosing, but directly in the circumstances of the encounter, the given, and the circumstances that have been handed down from the past.
The accident of history
On 29 May 1453, the Ottoman Turkish army, which had been besieging Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire for six weeks, launched a decisive general offensive on this day.
Before the general attack, facing the impregnable castle of Constantinople, Muhammad hurt his head, and there were always more ways than problems, so he gave full play to his generosity and ingenuity, such as spending a huge amount of money to build perhaps 20 to 30 huge cannons, a cannon to transport to the front line took more than two months and cost countless manpower and material resources, the cannon was built, from morning to night, the stones flew around, but the castle was still strong, and the problem still existed.
Then he had a sudden idea of sending a fleet over the mountains, an impossible task under the conditions of the time, but it was done by the paranoid and confident Muhammad, which made the defenders in Constantinople almost drop their jaws.
Although Muhammad let the fleet climb over the mountain into the inland sea, and the fleet ran behind the people's butts, the problem was still not solved, and Constantinople still stood there coldly, laughing at these outsiders and despising everything.
More than 300 years later, a similar frenzy was repeated, but this time it was well known, and in the spring of 1800, Napoleon led the reserve army across the Alps through the Grand Saint Bernard Pass, and no one expected him to do so, and Napoleon's crossing proved to be successful, because it had the desired effect, and Napoleon was elected as the first President of France.
There are two things left for people to remember, one is the same sentence: I am taller than the Alps. The second is a painting. Muhammad's feats did not have any effect, and it is estimated that he could only remain silent in order to avoid being laughed at by others.
When the general offensive began, from one o'clock in the morning to dawn, the 150,000-strong army still could not help 8,000 defenders, but the strangeness of history was that the possibility of defeating the giants was a straw.
Several Turkish soldiers found a small door opened between the outer and inner walls of the Walls of Theodossi,
Kecaporta Gate
The peacetime gate for pedestrians was forgotten by the tight defenders of the city. At first they thought it was a military tactic, because it was too absurd to be true, but it turned out that there was not a single defender here.
An incident by chance, a small door to oblivion, has determined the history of the world for hundreds of years.
With the collapse of the cross of Hagia Sophia, the Byzantine millennium empire came to an end and an Islamic empire arose.
There was a folk song in England: "One less nail, one horse's paw; one less horse's paw, one war horse; one war horse lost, a battle lost; one battle lost, a country lost. ''
If you return to the historical situation of that time, the fall of Constantinople in the face of European indifference may be sooner or later, or it may be that the Turkish army will withdraw when it loses confidence, but this small door in history says that history is doomed to be unchangeable.
The helplessness of history
This time it was Napoleon, but there was no other word left, but it proved the incomparable correctness of one sentence:
Don't be afraid of god-like opponents, just fear pig-like teammates.
With just a second of indecision, the stubborn General Grouchy made the "Waterloo" that should have been Napoleon's glorious battle synonymous with failure, and when we are all quoting this word, is it to thank Grouchy?
Failure is not terrible, terrible is not to seize the opportunity, this sentence is not a problem for Napoleon, even if exiled to the island of Elba, seize the opportunity Napoleon sneaked back to Paris and successfully restored.
It is said that a local newspaper at that time reported Napoleon's whereabouts:
The first message, "Monsters from Corsica have landed in Puerto Juan. ”
The second message, "The inexplicable Man-Eating Demon King is approaching Grace. ”
The third message, "The despicable and shameless thief of the state has entered Gelenoble. ”
The fourth message, "Napoleon Bonaparte occupies Lyon." ”
The fifth message, "General Napoleon approached Fontainebleau. ”
The sixth message, "His Majesty the Supreme Emperor has arrived today in his faithful Paris." ”
The media and the masses were officially partying, the ongoing Congress of Vienna could not continue, and in a hurry, the anti-French alliance agreement began to set out for France, and Napoleon once again faced a crisis, this time history had to turn a corner.
On 18 June 1815, a decisive battle between the French and the anti-French forces in the Belgian town of Waterloo was fought. On the first day before the war, based on strategic considerations, Napoleon divided an army to pursue the retreating Prussian army by General Grouchy, but Napoleon may have been too hasty, or he may have thought that it was a reason that everyone understood that he would not give orders to foreign troops, so he did not tell the other side to merge with him when he found something wrong, this small negligence led to a turn in the history of Europe.
When the decisive battle began, the armies commanded by Napoleon and the Anglo-Dutch forces under Wellington fought to the death, and as Zweig described in his book, the war was great, meaningful, and a gripping masterpiece of art: one moment of fear, the next moment of hope, the two dramatically alternated, and finally the transformation suddenly became a catastrophe.
Here Napoleon sent successive messengers to Grouchy, who was still faithfully carrying out the emperor's orders, even if there was not a hair of the enemy in sight, and his officers had protested and proposed that Grouchy meet the emperor, and one of the officers, Gérard, even suggested that he be allowed to lead at least his own division and cavalry to the battlefield to ensure that he arrived in time, but Grouchy only considered it for a second. Decided to listen to the emperor's official documents written on paper and refused to believe in the call of fate.
In the end, as we see, Napoleon was exiled to the island of Khel in the South Atlantic, where he spent the last 6 years of his life, and on May 5, 1821, Napoleon died on the island, and his empire was met with terrible revenge in that crucial second of hesitation, and all the great deeds disappeared.
Napoleon seems to have just made a decision, using the wrong person to lead to the collapse of the entire empire, this is the helplessness of history, no one would have foreseen such a consequence in advance, otherwise Napoleon would not have appointed other capable officers.
History cannot assume that Napoleon could only accept such a fate in desperation.
The cruelty of history
If a person can meditate on the things of heaven, then when he faces the things of the world, his words and thoughts will be more noble. To be alive means to think. --Cicero
In 212 BC, the Roman army invaded Syracuse, broke into Archimedes's residence, and saw an old man buried his head in geometry on the ground, and the soldiers trampled the figure. Archimedes angrily rebuked the soldiers: Don't break my picture! The soldier drew his short sword and stabbed the great scientist to death.
The cruelty of history is that, whether you like it or not, even the most clever and great minds can sometimes not compete with savage blood.
More than 100 years later, Cicero was born in Alpino, Italy, in 106 BC, and it is said that before his birth, his mother dreamed of a prophecy that Cicero would bring great well-being to Rome. This dream was entirely correct, Cicero, the first humanist, orator and defender of the law of the Roman Empire, had been striving to uphold the law and the republican form of government, and his book On the Republic was regarded as the moral code of the idealized state, but power was always a good thing, and Caesar became the master of Rome overnight.
But Caesar still respected the thinking, as long as Cicero left the political arena, Cicero could only return to the countryside in a gloomy way, in which Cicero began to meditate on the things of heaven, living meant thinking, thinking meant writing immortal chapters, during which Cicero enjoyed life while writing books, his life seemed to be transformed into the life of a philosopher.
But when Caesar was assassinated, Cicero could not stay safely in the countryside, and he also thought that the Republic was very likely to be revived again, but he forgot that when power was released, when everyone experienced the delicious taste of power, it was not an easy task to put power back in the cage, so when Cicero returned to Rome to speak around, no one cared, people just cared about how to live, and where the next powerful leader was, Cicero did not seize the opportunity, the opportunity slipped away. Originally, he could have raised his arms and shouted, and established a kingdom of power like Caesar in the form of violence, so that Rome could return to peace.
Rome ushered in the chaos of the Triumvirate: Antony, Octavian and Lipida. In order to be dictatorial, some problems must be solved first, and the biggest problem is Cicero's republican ideas, which only silenced some of the republican heads, Cicero ranked first, although Octavian once called Cicero a "true father", but in the face of strong interests, he could only compromise, and finally the assassination order was issued.
During the long run and hiding, Cicero was tired and said the remarkable quote before he died:
I always knew that I was going to die.
But the murderers did not want his philosophical system, but only wanted to receive a high bounty, and a centurion killed the helpless wise man with a knife.
The cruelty of history sometimes lies in the fact that no matter how great the thinkers and wise men are, in the face of pure violence, they retreat, but the violence from others does not shrink back, and those who only look at money do not care how the people of history look at them, they only see the golden gold coins at present.
"When the Stars Of Mankind Shine" is a moment in Zweig's history of mankind written in an artistic tone, after all, compared with the overall history of mankind, the events of these key points appear to be so short, but these short-lived in human history shine brightly, like the stars in the sky, some are well known, such as Napoleon, some will not be remembered, such as Captain Rouge, the author of the Marseillaise, but there is always a need for people to record the human stars, the stars are indeed many, can only look for meaningful and tragic, This may be the origin of this book.
Looking up at the stars in the sky, in fact, in the history of mankind, there are also our own stars, shining in the depths of history waiting for us to discover.
Text: Ding Ming read