One Man's Village is not a new book, as if the earliest edition was in 1998, and new publishers have been reprinting it for decades.
Reading this kind of book, my heart is extremely afraid. Because when you say it's good, it's more like picking up people's teeth and repeating the same thing; saying it's not good is not sensationalism, but it can still be said.
I didn't know much about Chinese rural literature, and I read very few books about rural life. It seems that this kind of book gives me the feeling of writing out the small pieces around me, and then the reader says that he is healed and moved.
When I was a child, I spent a lot of days in the countryside, and I still had some more real experiences of the countryside.
For example, building a house will occupy a little more land for each other because the wall will occupy a little more land, and the two families will fight; violent and vicious nature is to drug the dogs at night, pull the dogs out and steal them and sell them.
The countryside naturally has a peaceful and comfortable side, such as the mountains in the distance and the fields at the foot, or the secretly breaking of corn – of course, by their relatives.
Pigs, dogs, sheep, donkeys, cats, chickens, ducks, geese, birds and insects are all ordinary things - ordinary to a natural, not as urban people now regard dogs as something more precious than a baby. Now many people see cockroaches will shout, I remember that I also saw the centipede that was as thick as a small finger, and even scorpions - of course, in the mountains, in fact, this thing is afraid of heat, you do not take the initiative to provoke, it is eager to run away.
If you think about it, people always yearn for a life they haven't experienced, just like some people are happy to travel far, and some people will be moved to tears by rural stories.
Anhui Hongcun
"One Man's Village" is not a story about the countryside, but an essay about the countryside. Prose is usually sandwiched between discussions, fragmented and read some things, and then there is a sense of emotion, saying some plausible "sublimation", so it is not so much about the countryside as it is about philosophy.
Speaking of philosophy, it is inevitable to think of the classic three major questions "Who am I", "where do I come from", and "where am I going", unfortunately, or fortunately, the cultivation of philosophy requires the comfort of food and clothing, which may come from the innate freedom to eat and wear - such as the famous philosopher emperor, perhaps because life is simple and simple, there is no lust for material life, distractions - such as many worldly masters who live in the mountains.
In fact, everyone has the opportunity to become a philosopher, and all they have to do is to learn to get rid of all kinds of noise and distractions, and think more from the subtleties of life, "Why is this happening?" "What if that were the case?" “
Unfortunately, today we are hit by the magic of various screens, always disturbed by a variety of large and small irrelevant news, we are accustomed to accepting others' "carefully prepared" views, only need to paraphrase or even forward to others, it has become our own views.
Liu Liangcheng
Why does what Liu Liangcheng writes make people feel "amazing"? Digging deep into the bottom core, but there are only so many things that can be touched around the writer - so, there is a kind of "loneliness" between the lines, and there is not so much "random flowers and charming eyes", pondering and pondering, it has become everyone. But when people fall into the red dust, they will naturally lose the ability to observe in the past, and some things need a force field, and only in the force field of a certain environment can all kinds of rares be born.
In "One Man's Village", many pages are short but discussed, there are the author's self-percussion of the meaning of life, and there are all kinds of fragments and impermanences of the author's rural life. Its text is simple and quiet, deconstructing complexity with simplicity, revealing the world with innocence, and flowing out the beauty of "remote countryside".
In fact, in the face of countless puzzles that plague the people of the times, as long as we can return to our original intentions and escape unnecessary desires like Liu Liangcheng, we will find that the answer is hidden in our past.
However, sometimes sober and sometimes confused, we turn the past over, and when we look back, we may find that we can no longer read the various past.
When we read other people's words, we should not carry the "obsession" of reading comprehension on language test papers, and what we read is sometimes not the same as what the author wants the reader to see - of course, this is already a relatively public "secret".
To say something less, while reading This Book of A Man's Village, I would guess that some of the audience portraits of this book should be called little bourgeois, or perhaps spiritual little bourgeois.
In other words, the first time I knew the word "little bourgeoisie" was Qian Zhongshu's "Siege of the City". I feel that this word is particularly unpopular among the new generation, and I don't know how the younger generation will define this kind of "they actually live a hard life, but they also show that they have spiritual pursuits and world vision, and they pursue a variety of superficial tastes for life."
The people I know, if they are lucky enough to click on their circle of friends, can feel that their horizons are too wide, and the things they pay attention to are important but too big and too complicated, so that they hardly look at what is around them and under their feet.
This type of person has a more typical characteristic, forwarding an article in the circle of friends, with an expression or a few words full of feelings. I would like to announce that this statement is what I think, and I thank you for speaking for me in this article.
There is also an interesting detail, if you pay attention to the release time of the circle of friends, such as the time is concentrated in the evening (especially after 11 o'clock), the time is often during regular work hours, or the time is irregular (almost every day will be randomly posted)
Of course, this kind of person is not ignorant, in fact, their educational background is higher than mine, which shows that they know how to use the rules of the game in the module of test-taking education.
Unfortunately, some talents belong to the "shallow learning" of "not being a staff member in a chaotic world, and not entering a think tank in a prosperous world", moaning without illness, being sick and scornful, and exaggerating a little, which is called eye master and low.
They're real, real and a little unreal. This sense of contradiction often confuses me as to whether they empathize with the various overflowing praises of "One Man's Village" or whether they are vassals.
For a book that "most people" find good—the point is not a quantifiable book like the natural sciences—it is certainly more "wise" to say that it is good than to say that it is not good.
For me, One Man's Village is similar to Walden.
I believe that at this point, smart readers should have their own answers.