Cover news reporter Zhang Jie Xu Yuyang
Opening Line :
A person's temperament contains the road he (she) has traveled, the person he has loved, and what is more indispensable is the book he has read. You can even say, You are what read. A book you have read, integrated into the nourishment of your own life, is a memorandum of self-search and dialogue with the world. For writers, the importance of the study is even more self-evident. Reading and writing, the equivalent of the writer's wings, soar in the spiritual world.
Starting from the autumn of 2019, Cover News launched a new humanistic column "Study", using videos and texts to take readers into the study of readers and writers, and to meet the living souls exposed on the shelves. Start by reading, from books, and listen to stories about life.
Today is International Women's Day. In this issue, we walk into the study room of Qiu Shanshan, the winner of the Lu Xun Literature Award and a famous writer. Listen to the voice of her soul in the study, and the silent thinking power behind the book.
Qiu Shan Shan (Photo: Bai Kai)
Qiu Shanshan's home, living room, bedroom, many walls are filled with bookshelves. Location without TV. The whole home is a study. The bookcase is very tall, and the collection of books is full, "This set of "Lu Xun's Complete Works" was sent by my cousin when I was married. The journals in which her novels were published, hundreds of copies, neatly coded, piled up in piles. However, in an era of developed publishing, books are not in the collection, but in reading. A growing writer is certainly larger than his own collection of books.
Qiu Shan Shan now often listens to books on software. For example, in the Himalayas, re-listen to the literary classics you have read before. Like Turgenev's "Hunter's Notes", Márquez's "The Colonel Who Wrote To Him", Zweig's "Chess Story", Bai Xianyong's "Taipei Man", and of course, the tomes of "Dream of the Red Chamber" and "Quiet Don", "Those professional announcers spoke particularly well and enjoyed listening." ”
Not only listening to literary classics, but also the autobiography of Elon Musk's mother, Meyer Musk, also benefited her, "In addition to raising a few excellent children, this woman herself actually has a very bumpy past." Divorce, husband domestic violence, several setbacks in career. Now she's in her 70s, but she's still full of energy and still has two jobs. She said 70 was the best time of her life. This kind of vitality is intriguing. ”
Mount Qiu (courtesy of me)
Rereading Zhuangzi
Produce great spiritual freedom
It doesn't really matter what medium you read, it's important to look at works that are worth seeing. Qiu Shan Shan often laments that a literary masterpiece can be passed down to the present day, it must have been tested by time. After all, it was written by the most thoughtful and talented people in that country of that era, accumulating a lot of nutrients. "People have a limited amount of time in their lives. You can absorb a lot of things by reading a classic, which you can't accumulate in your own experience in life, which is very cost-effective. ”
Someone once said that people can probably be divided into two kinds, one is to read literary works, and the other is not to read. Now that the media is developed, you can also know the world's major events without reading literary works. But literature, this elegant but seemingly unnecessary thing, is often, in many cases, a golden thread of distinction: are you a thoughtful and affectionate experiencer of the world, or a hurried passerby?
However, persuading people to like literature is sometimes thankless, "literature reading, if some people really don't love it, it is difficult for you to persuade him." But once people who love to read taste the benefits, they will not give up and will read for life. Qiu Shanshan said.
The old land must be revisited, and the classics need to be reread. Many books are re-read to taste their true flavor. Qiu Shanshan was recently reading "Zhuangzi Getaway". "There is a fish in the north of the earth, and its name is a carp. The size of the carp is unknown to thousands of miles; it is transformed into a bird, and its name is Peng. Peng's back, I don't know how many thousands of miles it is; it flies with anger, and its wings are like clouds hanging in the sky. "Great! I used to read it in college, but the taste of this is only tasted after re-reading it now, "The getaway is actually not the getaway in the negative sense that we usually think, and we don't care about anything." Rather, it is a state of great spiritual freedom. I even thought that if Zhuangzi's thought had been valued by Chinese in the early days, it might have had a positive impact on Chinese philosophy. ”
She went on to read: "Pengzhi migrated to the south of the earth, the water hit three thousand miles, the one who lifted the rock was ninety thousand miles, and the one who went to rest in June was also." This bird does not stop flying for six months. It's amazing! So long ago, Zhuangzi had such an open and free mind, as well as an imagination of scientific significance, which is really beyond our reach today. It is recommended that you have time to re-read the classics, you will have new gains. ”
Qiu Shan Shan (Photo: Zhang Jie)
Can't always make yourself "too comfortable"
Make up your mind to overcome distractions and temptations
Many people feel that we are now more and more trapped by fragmented information. Brushing short videos is difficult to control. It becomes more difficult to settle down and read.
Qiu Shanshan shared a more effective experience or experience: every day must set yourself a fixed length of reading, and persevere, the amount of reading is very impressive.
She mentioned a Canadian medical educator named Osler who was very busy with daily affairs, teaching and writing. In order to ensure reading time, he stipulated that he read a book for 15 minutes before going to bed every night. He did the statistics, he can read 300 words a minute, 4500 words in 15 minutes, 126,000 words in a month, and 1.512 million words in a year. If a book is counted at 75,000 words, you can read 20 books in a year. He read more than half a century and read more than 1,000 books.
"I think it's very worth emulating. No matter how busy a person is, he should still be able to take 15 minutes of time every day and put his mobile phone aside and dedicate it to reading. Each of us struggles with ourselves every day. You must make up your mind: you must overcome interruptions and temptations. Sometimes people still don't make themselves too comfortable, or they still have to force themselves to do something and read some books. ”
A corner of Qiu Shan Shan Study (Bai Kai photography)
Keep in mind your mother's advice
Don't move your pen and ink and don't read a book
Modern society is overloaded with information, book publishers are numerous, and people's energy is relatively limited. Unwinding is not always beneficial. If you don't talk about the method, blindly reading with a boring head, it is likely to become a nerd. Many excellent people are very good at reading and have their own effective way of reading.
Qiu Shanshan's mother, a former editor of Zhejiang Daily, was an intellectual woman, and one of the words she often said to her daughter was, "Don't write or read." Even when you are not taking notes, or don't read the book, it is easy to read it in vain. To his mother's suggestion, Qiu Shanshan admitted that he had not done well before, but now he has a very convenient recording software on his mobile phone, which is very easy to use, such as hammer sticky notes. So now that I read books and see that it is particularly good, I will easily excerpt it. When reading a book, all kinds of thoughts flashed in my head were also written down.
Now she listens to more books, so there is a folder dedicated to storing the notes on listening to books, "or write them down." When you revisit it later, you will be particularly impressed. If you don't, a lot of what you read, and soon you forget because the scratches are too shallow. Speaking of this, Qiu Shanshan also mentioned a point in particular, "Sometimes reading an article can also learn a lot of things, not that you have to read a tome." The main thing is to see if you still have a learning mentality. Sometimes a public account article, there will be new knowledge points that you don't know, and it is also a kind of learning to read it carefully. ”
In the interview, Joshanshan will not only mention literary masters, but also people like tech and business magnate Elon Musk. She extended some of Musk's technologically advanced concepts to the humanities. For example, Musk built a "capsule train", which is considered to be not like a train at all. Musk said that "like a train" is already the second and third nature of a train, and the first nature of a train is to transport things safely and quickly from place A to place B. Qiu Shanshan also thought from this line of thinking, what is the first nature of writing? "It's what you want to write, you like to use words to express, to express your feelings, your views on the world, and nothing else." Many things, we can go back to the first nature to think, many things are easy to figure out. ”
Joshan said he has always been following Elon Musk and how he will move in technology. Some people will worry that the rapid development of science and technology is out of control, which will have various impacts on the existing order of the human world. Qiu ShanShan admits that "my mentality is optimistic. My point is that it is better to open up and accept it and understand what is going on. While the ethical risks of technology should be considered, we must also avoid falling into the mentality of always opposing new things, which is not right, that is not right, and always measures the future by the past. Since the future is coming, let's try to prepare for it before it arrives. ”
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Biography
Born in 1958, Qiu Shanshan joined the army in 1976 and graduated from the department of Chinese of Sichuan Normal University in 1983. He was the director of the former Chengdu Military Region's Creative Office and the former editor-in-chief of Southwest Military Literature. He is currently a member of the 10th Plenary Committee of the China Writers Association. He has published nearly 4 million words of novels, essays and other literary works. Representative works include the novel "I am waiting for you in heaven", "Spring Grass", the long essay "Distant Paradise", "Family Letter", the novella "Where is the Sound of the Piano" and so on. The long documentary essay "Distant Paradise" won the Fourth Lu Xun Literature Award. In addition, he has won two national "Five One Project Awards" and the People's Liberation Army Literature and Art Award.