Stoner: You're not a jerk enough, so you don't really mix as much success

freely

Stoner, written by the American writer John Williams, was published more than fifty years ago, and when it was first published, the book went unnoticed, and it was only in 2006 that the book was reprinted by the New York Review of Books, when it quickly became popular around the world and was hailed as "the greatest literary pearl of the last century."

In a sense, people are more and more aware that they are Stoner, an ordinary ordinary person, born, studying, married, having children, aging, death, our life is like Stoner's life, "You will let the world eat you, spit you out, you will lie there wondering what you have done wrong." 」 Because you always expect something from the world, and it doesn't have that thing, it doesn't want that either! ”

"An enviable loser"

Stoner said he didn't succeed in a secular sense, he had a failed marriage, he had a colleague who targeted himself while teaching at school, he wasn't remembered after his death, and he failed in that respect. But he found something he was willing to defend, and defended it all his life, in the sense that he was enviable. How many of us have been busy all our lives but have done nothing, we don't know what we like, we don't know the meaning of our existence, we just live but never know why.

Dave, a good friend of his when Stoner was a student, once said, "College is like a shelter or — what do they call it now?" It is a place of cultivation for those who are weak, old, dissatisfied, and uncompetitive. Look at the three of us – we're just a university. In the following decades, Dave's words have always influenced Stoner, in order to guard this shelter Stoner did not hesitate to offend the villain and not let the inkless Volcker pass the thesis defense, Stoner's life has many compromises and escapes, but he is willing to devote his life to the love in his heart.

"His eyes hurt a little from staring at the dimly lit books for a long time ... but he still opened his heart to the world, the world he quickly wandered through, and found some joy in it." This may be Stoner's life creed, life is very hard, but there is always something worth it.

"Love is a process, not a result"

There is no doubt that Stoner's marriage failed, and in his youth he fell in love with Edith, who by chance, by chance, and expressed his love to Edith clumsily but quickly. Edith accepted Stoner because she wanted to escape her family of origin, and they married without love. The marriage had a terrible experience for him, and he, Edith, and their daughter had all paid a terrible price for their hasty marriage.

In middle age, he met his beloved, Catherine, and those who loved each other never needed to say much, and they could understand each other with one look. As the book says, "At the age of forty-three, Stoner learned something that others—people younger than him—had learned long before him: the person you initially loved was not the person you ultimately loved, and that love was not the ultimate goal but a process by which one wanted to get to know the other." "But two people whose souls are compatible have to be separated in the face of the world, and no one can help when they meet the right person at the wrong time."

"You were born there, and half of you died there"

Stoner grew up with his parents on a not-so-fertile farm, and in the depths of Stoner's memory, "it was the knowledge of hardship, hunger, endurance, and pain," and the environment in which he grew up did not determine a person's life, but it always affected a person's life. "Although he rarely remembers his early experiences at Booneville Farms, the edge of his consciousness often thinks of his own blood lineage." To some extent, it can be said that we seem to have escaped from the environment in which we grew up like Stoner, but in fact, these things engraved in the genes are always inadvertently coming out.

Stoner is like each of us, just a small individual in the vast world, we are fighting against fate all our lives, it seems that we have escaped from fate and finally can't escape fate.