The European Travelogue, author of "The Lost Satellite", wrote an escape from the inner volume of all young minds: Travel is an opportunity to makeover and become a human being, to escape the burden of life, to confirm themselves on the road.
A journey that began at the age of twenty-eight, a writing dedicated to all young minds: a journey is an escape, an escape from the inner scroll, a refusal to lie flat
"Arriving Before Midnight" is the first travel literature work by writer Liu Zichao. In this book, he goes deep into the middle of Europe and embarks on a journey of escape and search.
Central Europe grew up in the cracks between empires and powers, tearing and wandering in the long river of history. She built a vast empire, ignited two world wars, and was cut off by the Iron Curtain in the Cold War.
During the short summer months, young writers jump on trains and travel on long tracks. Escape from the parades in Berlin, shuttle through Dresden and Auschwitz, walk the streets where Kafka became a commodity, and escape the reality underground of Prague. On long winter nights, travelers fall asleep on the bed of the Grand Budapest Hotel and wake up in the streets by the Danube. He got in his car and headed for the Great Plains of Hungary, trapped by the rain in yesterday's café, only to see the world change overnight in Trieste.
Restlessness and stinging, kindness and comfort, light and shadow – distant Central Europe is like a mirror image, still maintaining its eternal qualities, attracting the equally confused young mind. When reality is too heavy, when the times are too frivolous, to see the scenery and the human world, to witness hope and suffering, in order to understand that "there are still people living like this in the world", to confirm themselves in the departure and arrival again and again.
When modern people are accustomed to enjoying the information convenience of the Internet, Liu Zichao insists on entering the scene in the flesh and reproducing the journey with literature. The human condition he witnesses and writes about refreshes the coordinates and horizons of our view of today's world. And those unfamiliar place names that are on the edge of the world and in the cracks are also connected to us because of the presence of a Chinese writer.
Arriving Before Midnight records my two wanderings across the continent: "Summer" by train and "Winter" by car.
In fact, the number of trips to the European continent is far more than twice. Over the past three years, there have been opportunities for me to return to Central Europe like a ghost revisited in the old world, and there may be some underlying reason for this, like gravity. I think that in addition to the charm of the region itself, the attraction of Central Europe to me is that it has always grown in the gap between empire and power, stubbornly maintaining its own uniqueness. It still has a strong sense of tearing and wandering, and it makes me feel a certain spiritual fit at the age of thirty.
It's not that I've suffered so many misfortunes that I've lost the meaning of life. In my opinion, as I get older, it is already meaningful enough to cope with daily life with as much dignity as possible. Perhaps because of this, I often feel that I need to find a "fulcrum" in this mediocre real world - only by finding this "fulcrum" will I get a more powerful grip on my future life. This is probably the common feeling of my generation.