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Selfish giants
◈ | Wilde
Every afternoon, children always like to play in the giant's garden after school.
It's a lovely big garden, covered with green grass and beautiful flowers everywhere, as many as the stars in the sky. There are also twelve peach trees growing on the meadow, which bloom in the spring and bear fruit in the autumn. The birds perched on the branches of the trees sing joyful songs, and whenever this happens, the children in the play will stop and listen to the birds singing and shout to each other, "How happy we are."
One day, the giant returned. It turned out that he had visited the house of his yokai friend Konigsi, and had lived in the yokai's house for seven years. After seven years of finishing all that he was going to say, he decided to go back to his castle. Entering the house, he saw children playing in the garden.
"What are you doing here?" He roared in a gruff voice, and the children ran away. "My garden is my own garden," said the giant, "and everyone knows that I do not allow outsiders to come here to play." So he built a high wall along the garden and hung a notice: "Idlers are not allowed to break the law."
He is indeed a very selfish giant.
From then on the poor children had no place to play, and they had to come to the road, but the streets were full of dust and hard stones, which made them very unhappy. After school, they often wander outside the towering walls, talking about the beautiful views of the gardens inside the walls. "How happy we are in it," they told each other.
Spring is here again, and the whole village is full of small flowers and birds singing everywhere. However, the garden of the selfish giant is still a cold winter scene. Because they could not see the children, the birds did not have the heart to sing, and the trees forgot to blossom. A flower popped its head out of the grass, and when it saw the notice, it felt deep sympathy for what had happened to the children, so it retracted its head and went back to sleep. Only snow and frost are overjoyed by this. "Spring has forgotten this garden," they cried, "so that we can live here all year round." Snow held the grass tight with her huge white cloak, and frost made all the trees pretend, and then they invited the north wind to live with them. The north wind was invited, wearing a fur coat, and he whistled at the garden all day, blowing off the chimney pipe cap. "It's a happy place," he said, "and we'll have to call hail." So the hail came. For three hours a day he kept banging on the roof of the castle, the stone tiles of the house smashed to pieces, and then he ran around the garden in a circle. His body was covered in gray, and he exhaled a chill that attacked people.
"I really don't understand why spring is so late," said the giant, sitting at the window looking out at the icy garden outside, "and I look forward to the weather changing." ”
However, spring never reappeared, and summer was nowhere to be seen. Autumn gave the golden fruit to the gardens of thousands of families, but nothing to the gardens of the giants. "He's too selfish," Autumn said. In this way, the giant's garden is a cold winter all year round, only the north wind, hail, frost and snow jumping up and down the forest in the garden.
One morning, the giant was lying on the bed with his eyes open, and there was a beautiful music in his ears. The music was so sweet that he thought it must be the king's musician passing through here. It turned out that it was only a small cardinal singing outside the window, only because the giant had not heard the birds singing in the garden for a long time, and now he felt that it was wonderful. By this time, the hail above the giant's head was no longer dancing wildly, and the north wind had stopped whistling, and wisps of fragrance came through the open window silhouette. "I believe spring has finally arrived," said the giant, jumping out of bed and looking out the window.
What did he see?
He saw a moving scene: children had climbed through a small hole in the wall and entered the garden, sitting on the branches of a tree, and on each tree sat a child. The trees that welcomed the children were ecstatic, and Izui dressed himself up with flowers and waved his arms to gently stroke the children's heads. Birds danced and sang excitedly in the treetops, and flowers sticking out of the grass with smiling faces. It's a moving picture indeed. There was only one corner of the garden still shrouded in severe winter, the farthest corner of the garden, where a little boy was standing alone, too small to climb the tree, and could only circle around the tree, crying and at a loss. The poor tree was still tightly wrapped in frost and snow, and the north wind roared at it recklessly. "Climb up, little child," said the tree, and hung down as many branches as possible, but the child was still too short.
This scene deeply touched the heart of the giant. "I'm so selfish!" He said, "Now I understand why spring won't come to me." I'm going to carry the poor child up the tree, and then I'm going to tear down the walls so that my garden will always be a place for the children to play. "He was really ashamed of what he had done in the past.
The giant walked gently downstairs, quietly opened the front door, and walked into the garden. But when the children saw the giant, they fled in fright, and the garden returned to winter. Only the little boy did not run, because his eyes were full of tears, and he did not see the giant who came by. The giant crept up behind the child, gently lifting the child with both hands and placing it on the branch. The trees immediately burst into flames, the birds flew back into the branches and sang, and the little boy put his arms around the giant's neck and kissed the giant's face. The other children saw that the giant was no longer so fierce, and they all ran back, and spring followed the children. "Children, this is your garden," said the giant. Then he lifted a large axe and cut down all the walls. At 12 noon, when people went to the market, they were delighted to see the giants and children playing together in the most beautiful garden they had ever seen. They played all day, and after nightfall, the children said goodnight to the Giants.
"But where's your little friend?" The giant asked, "It was the boy I carried to the tree." "The giant loves the boy the most because the boy kissed him.
"We don't know," replied the children, "he's gone." ”
Then the giant said, "Tell him that he will come here tomorrow." But the children told the giant that they didn't know where the little boy lived, and that they had never seen him before, and the giant was very upset when he heard it.
Every afternoon, the children come to play with the giants as soon as school is over. But the little boy the giant loved never came again. The giant was very kind to every child, but he missed the little boy more and often mentioned him. "How I wish I had wanted to see him," the giant often exclaimed.
Many years passed, and the giants became old and infirm. He could no longer play with the children, so he could only sit in a huge armchair and watch the children play games while admiring his garden. "I have a lot of beautiful flowers," he said, "but children are the most beautiful flowers." ”
One winter morning, the giant got up and looked out the window as he got dressed. Now he didn't hate winter anymore, because he knew in his heart that it was just a matter of taking a nap in the spring and letting the flowers breathe.
Suddenly, he rubbed his eyes in surprise and fixed his eyes on looking and looking. The view is truly wonderful: in the corner at the end of the garden, there is a tree full of cute white flowers, the branches of the tree are shining with gold, the branches are hanging from the silver fruit, and under the tree stands the little boy whom the giant particularly likes.
Excited, the giant ran downstairs and ran out toward the garden. He hurried across the grass and ran toward the child. Coming to the child, he blushed and said indignantly, "Who dares to make you like this?" "I saw that the child had two nail marks on the palms of one of his small hands, and two nail marks on one of his small feet.
"Who would dare to make you like this?" The giant roared, "Tell me, I'll go get my sword and kill him." ”
"Don't!" The child replied, "These are the marks of love." ”
"Who are you?" As the giant spoke, a strange sense of awe arose in his heart. He knelt down in front of the little boy at once.
The little boy looked at the giant with a smile on his face and said, "You let me play in your garden once." Today I'm going to take you to my garden, which is heaven. ”
When the children ran into the garden that afternoon, they saw the giant lying under the tree, dead, covered in white flowers.
—End—
Source | Such as studying media
Lu Yang's novel as a whole has a very distinct personal character, based on the sensitive experience of individual life, and does not seem to be intended to present social and historical reality. This does not mean, however, that his work does not care about it. The richness of the meaning, the multidimensionality of emotion, and the subtlety of the details in his novels are probably far beyond our ordinary imagination.
In addition to "Mother", Cao Kou's "Less and More Ten Dollars" and "Deep Night" were also included in the "Quartet".
"Chinese College Students Poetry Annual Selection 2018" has received a total of 804 valid manuscripts since the call for papers, covering 29 provinces, municipalities directly under the Central Government, autonomous regions, as well as Hong Kong, Macao and other places. The manuscript covers 463 universities and colleges. In the end, 200 campus poets and 232 youth poems were selected and published into a book.
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