Liang Dongfang
In modern life, for most people, literature is generally useless after puberty. Adults who have always loved literature are either practitioners including but not limited to writing, publishing, and book marketing, or people who do not eat human fireworks; and even practitioners, how many of them are people who really love literature, are very question marks. This is roughly the norm in any economic "shi" society.
But the uselessness of literature is sometimes a very intimate thing in life that is entangled with usefulness, which can salvage people from the quagmire of usefulness but do not solve the confusion of the soul, and find a comrade, a lover, and even a nearly complete escape for your soul that has always been detached. The Swiss writer Walser, the Portuguese writer Pessoa, the Polish writer Bruno Schultz, and so on are all writers who are unknown before they die, and in the process of their obscure lives, it is by relying on the company of literary writing that they can continue their lives less painfully and even with some pleasure.
This does not mean that literature itself is sacred, but that the reality is that the label of literature is always the majority of words that are only in the lower instincts of man and only in the realm of utilitarianism, and that stories and routines that are obsessed with people, even if they are literary, have been lackluster, at least for me.
Because I have always had a hobby that seems strange in the general literary interest: like paintings on the subject of nature, I like the works in literature that depict nature as the object. For example, Chekhov who went to "The Prairie" in his grandfather's carriage to cut the grass, such as Prishvin who liked to walk alone in the forest, such as Hudson who rode his bicycle to chase birds and make observation notes, such as Jeffries who wrote about life in the field and about bush hedges, such as Clézio who wrote "The Man Who Has Not Seen the Sea"... Of course, they write not only about nature, but about nature in their eyes, which ultimately comes down to the relationship between man and nature. In the relationship between man and nature, writing and literature are tributaries in literature, but they are also the highest realm of literature that I have Chinese. This is determined by what I see as the uselessness of literature: literature is the beauty, intoxication, and ultimate value of life; the only thing that matches such a recognition of literary value is nature, man's experience and praise of nature. The main divinity of literature is in such a discourse relating to nature.
It was in this reading tendency that I had the privilege of meeting Hesse. To be precise, the light of Hesse shone on me, and when I finally went to Calv, his hometown in the Black Forest of Hesse, between the mountains and rivers of the Monastery of Maulbronn where he attended, and the hermitage on the shores of Lake Constance like the sea, and the Hesse House between the Swiss Alps, to pursue the landscapes in his writings, this light was always really shining in front of my eyes.
Hesse's naturally easy and logical words hit me at once. This kind of language style is also my own conscious or unconscious pursuit. For example, even in his comments and essays, he always writes his direct feelings and thoughts, rarely cites, never quotes scriptures, and never shakes knowledge. This is also my own reading preference and personal writing principle. Hesse is a writer of feelings, and his greatest value is his feelings, and this is the root of an artist's being an artist.
The closeness of a reader to a writer sometimes stems from the tone and habit of this narrative, who, like a person's breath, naturally attracts you. Hesse is a well-preserved natural environment in Europe, and his Nobel Prize-winning work "The Glass Ball Game" actually deviates from the tone of most of his works about the relationship between man and nature, which in my opinion is actually not outstanding, and his most brilliant is the natural text immersed in the mountains, rivers and lakes of the earth. He has written speculative things, he has written about love, he has written about theory, but he is still a true child of nature. The works of "Peter Carmenqing", which seamlessly combine a person's youthful dreams with natural landscapes, always have a shocking and eternal charm; the inexplicable sorrow and undulating hopes of people in their youth have a mysterious consistency with the rhythms of nature day and night, four seasons, cold and summer. Hesse captured this mysterious consistency, using poetic words to weave the clouds and flowers and the sounds of color in human life into a seductive intertextual relationship, which deeply touched my heart every time I read it.
Peter Carmenqing begins with God, and then talks about nature, God's dwelling place, the nature that "I" observe as a child and a teenager, the water trees and clouds in nature, my shepherd life under the clouds, the school life that changed my shepherd life, and the novel enters the so-called main topic after the beginning of tens of thousands of words, that is, the plot that we are usually accustomed to in literature.
His eloquent narration has almost no story, but it can still be read down with great interest. Because the author's narrative context is the growth of the inner world of young people, the feeling and progress of human cognition of nature and society, and the growth history of a sensitive soul.
The empirical narrative and the ethereal perceptual expression are always crossed; the ethereal narrative is often inserted into the real narrative, and the two complement each other, without fatigue to the reader and without making the narrative too flat.
Near the end of the novel, I was surprised to find that Hesse had the same habit as me in carrying a small notebook to record the scenery of the suburbs; and that at first he was only willing to record the scenes in nature, recording the wind, frost, rain, snow, trees, flowers, mountains, rivers, and trees like sketches, but consciously or unconsciously ignoring people's interests was the same as mine. This description of the protagonist in the book is in fact his own master's own self-righteousness, a faithful record of his aesthetic process and the course of his life. Hesse actually expressed his aesthetic tendency to alienate himself from the so-called normal human society in a way that loved nature. From an early age, he had a spiritual temperament that rebelled against the usual path of life and despised the existing seemingly natural pattern of life, which always accompanied him until his death.
His seemingly casual brushstrokes closely combine free writing with a free life—an aesthetic life different from that of ordinary people—and breathes with nature at all times. This is hesse's most fundamental way of writing and life.
This thin little book I only read in the natural environment, it followed me from spring to summer in the suburbs to experience a lot of wonderful dusk and evening, experienced the baptism of the silent spring rain, also experienced the hail thunderstorm wind, and finally there was a mood that was reluctant to finish reading.
In today's state of life, when human beings have more and more lost the opportunity to feel the natural feelings of Thoreau's Walden, in the increasingly rare nature, they recall the classics of natural literature, including Hesse, and see that human beings have been so rich in such a rich nature, which is already a literary and natural and precious bequest of the earth. Good literature soothes people and guides life in this sense.