Writing class | reason and emotion, and no one can be less

Song Baoying/Cartography

Author: Man Tang

The first time I stepped into Beijing's Old Summer Palace was in the early 1990s. At that time, the range of walking in the garden was larger than it is now, and I saw more and felt more. After a day of riding the green-skinned train back to my hometown, I sat down to write an essay, and suddenly a sentence came out of my pen: "You have your Yuanmingyuan, I have my Yuanmingyuan." With this exclamation, the next step is easy to write, and there is a good restriction, which can only write purely personal feelings, and distance itself from the words written by others in the Yuanmingyuan.

After writing it, I thought that this exclamation with both emotion and reason was actually a model of the Lebanese writer Gibran, to put it simply, it was copied.

Gibran used a title: "You Have Your Lebanon, I Have My Lebanon." He was born there and left as a teenager. His experience was like Husseini's. Husseini was a teenager when he left his homeland, and by the beginning of the 21st century, his "Kite Chaser" was a worldwide hit, and people cast more and more concerned eyes on Afghanistan, a small country deep in Eurasia. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was Gibran who brought Oriental literature to the world, and at the same time made the small Mediterranean country of Lebanon world-famous.

It is not delusional that a writer brings glory to a nation.

"You have your Lebanon, I have my Lebanon. You have your Lebanon and its problems, and I have my Lebanon and its magnificence. Gibran wrote in his longing for a faraway homeland.

There are many more such comparative sentences:

"Your Lebanon is the port, the postal service, the trade; my Lebanon is the distant thought, the fiery feelings, the divine language spoken softly by the ears of the earth in the sky. Your Lebanon is the clerk, the worker, the manager; my Lebanon is the ambition of youth, the determination of middle age, the wisdom of old age. Your Lebanon is a meeting of delegations and committees of all kinds, and my Lebanon is a gathering by the hearth on a night of windswept snow. ...... Your Lebanon is the law, the terms on paper, the contracts and contracts in the dossiers; my Lebanon is an endowment in the mystery of life, which does not know that it knows everything, is the thought of fumbling to the edge of the netherworld in awakening, and it thinks that it is still in a dream. ”

Reading these words, will your heart beat like a drum? Do you feel that the feelings of home and country that are constantly involved have filled you?

In the good writer, the expression of reason is like wisdom, and wisdom is connected to emotion, just as the trunk of a tree is connected to the leaves.

In my newly conceived, not necessarily accurate, metaphor, the prose work that is full of emotion and lacks reason is nothing more than a low bush on a hillside; only the prose of reason and no emotion, a tree without a canopy and leaves, bare and not pretty.

That is why Gibran said that his Lebanon was a distant thought, a fiery feeling, a divine language spoken softly by the ears of the earth in the sky.

For reason and emotion, Gibran used a metaphor: "Your reason and enthusiasm are the rudder and sail of your voyage." If your rudder or sail is damaged, you will have to drift away from the sea or stay at sea. Reason alone is a force of repression; the freedom of enthusiasm is the flame that burns everything until it burns the self. ”

It should be said that Gibran's analogy of rudder and sail is better than the trunk and branches of the tree I have just said. His metaphor is moving, speaking of the writer's state in writing, while my metaphor is static, saying what the work looks like after it is written.

Now, let's see, how do reason and emotion come together? Can Gibran's approach make its way into our personal writing?

"Music is the companion of the shepherd when he is lonely. The shepherd sat on a rock, among his flock, and with his reed flute played a tune that his sheep could understand, and the sheep obediently grazed. To the shepherd, The Reed Flute is like a friend who never separates, a lovely companion... Music accompanies our souls, walks with us through all stages of life, and shares sorrow and joy with me. Music is like an angel on our happy days, and like a compassionate relative in our hard and difficult days. ”

This passage, taken from Gibran's first collection of essays, "Musical Short Chapters", has the enthusiasm of literary youth and the freshness from the East, but lacks personal thinking and personal feelings. Many of the genres that came to be known as chicken soup for the soul also disguised as this.

Writers need to find their own direction. In other words, finding a good direction is a good writer.

Living in the East as a teenager and walking in the West as a teenager, with both the sensibility of the East and the rationality of the West, Gibran was a bilingual writer who could write in both Eastern and Western scripts. In the West, there are also writers who are both emotional and rational, such as Nietzsche. In 1883, the year Gibran was born, Nietzsche completed the first three volumes of The Sayings of Zarastura.

"Man is a rope that stretches between an animal and a superman—a rope that crosses the abyss. Crossing is dangerous, on the road is dangerous, retrospective is dangerous, trembling and hesitating in the middle is dangerous. Nietzsche wrote in Chalastura, "Rise, rise, dream, think, everything weighs on me, I am like a patient: just tired and asleep because of his terrible pain, but awakened by a bad dream." I have something in me called bravery: it has always been a natural enemy of frustration. ”

Gibran read the book around the age of 28, was fascinated, shocked, and understood, and entered the writing channel where reason and emotion converge. Over the next 20 years, he wrote a number of works that both the East and the West were proud of.

The most widely circulated is the imitation of Nietzsche's "Prophet", the protagonist is a wise man who is about to return to the homeland of the East, and when he leaves, he discusses love and beauty, life and death, sin and punishment, marriage and family, and so on.

"My bloodied heart is gently whispering to you. This is the love of being flogged by oneself in words, this is the pride of damaged in the light dust, this is the desire for your love, standing on the roof, roaring at you... You turn your heads and ears: He looks with the light of God, He speaks like an ancient prophet, He reveals our souls, he opens the locks of our hearts, He knows our ways like an eagle knows the whereabouts of a fox. ”

Before the end of the book, the prophet suddenly raised his head, woke up from a big dream, and stretched out his arms. He said, "When the night is over, when dawn comes from the hill, our children of that night deserve to die." A stronger love will rise from our ashes, a love that laughs under the sun, a love that does not die. ”

Gibran was like a pure man, tearfully singing the praises of those basic human emotions. That emotion comes from a distant time, but it is full of eternal meaning.

Why is it that the simple and natural philosophy of life and moral emotions, tedious in someone else's pen, are readable in his place? Because of the charming imagination and strong appeal, his personality fills each sentence, allowing strong feelings to overflow and stimulating the reader's emotional reflection arc.

Those of you who have read The Prophet should re-read Gibran's collection of essays, The Mad Man.

In Madman, he said, "You asked me how I became a madman." Here's how it happened, on the day when many gods were far from being born, one day I woke up from a deep sleep to find that all my masks had been stolen—for the first time in history, and the sun kissed my bare cheeks, and my heart ignited the love for the sun. I don't need those masks anymore. ”

His description also became more and more mature: "After another thousand years, I ascended the holy mountain again and said to the Lord: My Lord, my ultimate, my destination, I am yesterday's you, you are the Ming Dynasty me, I am your root on the earth, you are my flower in the sky, we grow together under the gaze of the sun." So the Lord leaned over and whispered sweet words in my ear, like the sea embracing a rushing stream, and He became one with me. ”

There is a "Night and Madman", which uses the dramatic dialogue between the two characters "Crazy Man" and "Night":

"Oh, madman, are you like me? Are you really like me? Can you ride a storm like commanding a war horse, and hold lightning like a sword? Like you, oh, night, like you, majestic and profound, my throne is high above the fallen gods. There was also daylight passing in front of me, and they could only kiss the corners of my clothes, but they could never gaze at my face. - My darkest child of hearts, are you really like me? Can you ask for my unruly thoughts and speak my vast language? Yes, we are twins, oh night, because you reveal space and I reveal my soul. ”

Gibran said that he was like an illiterate who was capturing a sentence from a book written by wisdom that had been written on the title page of affection before time appeared.

He told the writer: "Let your souls raise reason to the extreme of enthusiasm, and it will sing; let your souls guide the direction of passion with reason, so that your enthusiasm will undergo a daily resurrection, like a phoenix reborn from its ashes." ”

Guest Editor: Dong Xueren

Source: China Youth Daily client