An age-old posture: facing the great river
Li Li
From the perspective of human geography, China is a continent of its own. With a large river continental type of basic landform facing the sea, the main civilized areas have low and flat terrain, and the soil is fertile and rainy, resulting in a special almost closed farming society. Only by beginning to flee and take risks can we break the fixed and closed nature of agriculture. However, the Chinese civilization to the east and south, are the vast Pacific Ocean can not cross, to the north is the Siberian ancient ice field can not go north, to the southwest is the roof of the world Himalayas can not be crossed, Chinese culture and world culture has been relatively isolated by the Himalayas, Siberia and the Pacific Ocean these three natural barriers relatively isolated. Because of the relative lack of land, people must be intensively cultivated; and the perfection of the skills and tools caused by this intensive cultivation in turn prompts people to pay more attention to adapting to the life cycle of the land, paying attention to the unity of nature and man, and unless there are special circumstances, they will not open up other reclamation matters. As a result, the natural economy and society established on the land of China for thousands of years are basically a small regional society with loose relations with or even isolation from the outside world. Almost all the civilizations in the Central Plains of the Chinese nation can be attributed to the development of agriculture in a closed state, and the resulting rule of "emphasizing the root and suppressing the end" and the whole set of family patriarchal systems developed on this basis are all closely in line with and adapted to it.
In the reciprocating cycle of spring, summer, autumn and winter round time, in the almost stagnant feeling of life Chinese, a mighty river, the green mountains can not cover, after all, the east flow, to the people who cultivate the field do not know the distance, to the farthest place than the distance - the end of the reckless sky and the sea. In the face of such a turbulent river, it is easy for Chinese to rise up a deep sigh of life:
From Confucius's "The son is on the river, the deceased is like Sihu, not willing to give up day and night", to du Fu's famous sentence in "Ascending to the Heights", "The boundless falling wood is under Xiao Xiao, the Yangtze River is not endless", from Su Shi's famous article "Nian Nu Jiao Chibi Huaigu" in "The great river goes east, the waves are exhausted, and the characters of the ancient winds and currents" are exhausted, to the opening words of the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" "Rolling water in the east of the Yangtze River, the waves exhaust the heroes." Success or failure turns empty. The green mountains are still there, and the sunset is red a few degrees. White-haired fisherman on the river, used to watch the autumn moon and spring breeze. A pot of turbid wine is a happy encounter. How many things in ancient and modern times are paid for laughter and talking about", from the theme song of the popular TV series "Shanghai Beach" "The waves are rushing and the waves are endless / The waves of the river never end / Exhausting the world's affairs / Mixing up a gushing trend", to the contemporary poet Haizi's "I am infinitely ashamed in the face of the big river / My years are wasted / Empty and tired"... The river is horizontal in front of it, gushing in the east, the waves are lapping on the shore, never returning, which can be called a majestic image, triggering the desolate sighs of Chinese, singing and sighing, this emotion is connected from ancient to modern times, continued from generation to generation, and is a unique complex that belongs to Chinese. In contrast, Japanese people cannot have such a complex. Because Japan is an island country, the ancient Japanese did not know that there was an endless wilderness on the land, never saw the sun rise from the horizon and fall from the horizon, and did not know that there was a rolling and choppy Yangtze River on the earth. The island environment makes it impossible for Japanese culture to create works as large as large rivers and rivers, and japanese culture is characterized by simple and short characters, represented by japanese songs and haiku. The geography of mountains and rivers, the shaping of a national culture, really has a fatalistic meaning.
For Chinese, facing the river, this is a typical scene of life's confusion. On the land of China, the mountains in the west and the plains in the east tilt the ground from west to east, so that all rivers, especially the two major rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, flow from west to east. These two rivers, one rugged and masculine, are the cradle of Confucianism, and the other is rich and feminine, which is the indiscriminate pursuit of Taoism, and they have the same source and flow in the same direction. This natural regularity on a vast scale makes Chinese feel that the order of time has a source and a destination. In the face of the great river, what man is facing is time and existence, a certain limitation of man's existence, and an interrogation of the meaning of man's life. In the face of the great river, looking at the river that flows day and night and has flowed for thousands of years, the stones and sand carried by the water, the rotten grass and trees floating on the surface of the water, and the broken boat boards scattered on the shore, cannot but remind people of a term that is doubly sad - "history". Look at the rush of this great river, it is composed of everyone who is like a trickle of dust. All the waves and the whole river are rushing to the target in the midst of agitation, to many goals, distant goals that can only be reached through the gaze and watchful eye of generation after generation. The great river is unstoppable, and the huge energy accumulated by it rushes forward, turning thousands of turns, turning a thousand beaches, and in the churning hundreds of thousands of huge waves, there are the sounds of bitterness and happiness, the sounds of good and evil, the sounds of crying and laughing, the sounds of hundreds of millions of voices intersecting, unable to distinguish between laughter and sorrow, and never calming the struggle...
Since I was a child, I have lived in a small city facing a big river - Wuzhou, Guangxi, this small city in Lingnan, built by the mountains, built by the river, the mountains come to the north, the mountains are connected to the five ridges, the waters come together, and the rivers reach the sea. The area of river water accounts for about 10% of the total area of Wuzhou. Although it is only a small amount of 10% of the water area, this is the third largest river in China - the main road of the Pearl River Basin, the confluence of the three rivers of the Xijiang, Xunjiang and Guijiang rivers, the golden waterway of the Liangguang region, and about 80% of the water volume of the rivers in the Eight Gui Lands - more than 700 rivers of all sizes rush here, leaving the Guangdong Sea in the east and rushing to the ocean. Figuratively speaking, Wuzhou, which is located in the center of the two Guangzhou regions, is the total outlet of the river water in Guangxi and the main entrance of Guangdong, and Wuzhou has been known as the "water gateway" since ancient times.
Living here, the daily scenery is to face the big rivers. The most spectacular of the eight scenic spots in Wuzhou is the Spring Pan of the Yuanjiang River, which is the first of the eight scenic spots, that is, after the confluence of the GuiJiang River from north to south, the green belt-like Guijiang River and the wide Xijiang River from west to east, the clear water of the Guijiang River and the turbidity of the Xijiang River flow at the same time, one turbid and one clear, one urgent and one slow, clear and clear, clear and clear, just like the mandarin ducks playing in the water, nestled with each other, it is difficult to give up, commonly known as the "Mandarin Duck River", which was praised by the great poet Su Dongpo of the Song Dynasty as "the Mandarin Duck Is Unparalleled in the Water World". Facing a big turquoise river, facing a big yellow river, facing the yellow and green after the confluence of the two rivers, after a long period of channel, they are inseparable from each other, and it is difficult not to see each river as a living life. They have specific qualities, unique styles, their own will, and the ups and downs of their life cycle. If you look at the meandering body of this river again, you will find that the nature of water is the same as human nature, and every river is narrow here and more turbulent there; slow here, wide there; now clear, now cold, now slow, now warm... Every river contains all the qualities of mankind, sometimes one trait manifests itself, sometimes it is replaced by another. The great poet Xin Zhiyi once had a wonderful sentence "I see how feminine qingshan is, and I think that qingshan should be like this", I think, human beings face the great river to witness its thousand turns, and the big river faces human beings, and also witnesses the thousand turns of human society, right? When the great rivers go east, even the characters of the ancient winds and currents have been swept away by the great waves, not to mention those tiny people who look like ants in the heavens and the earth. The great river is as solemn as ever, watching the changes of the world, but the years are vast and long, looting one after another, and not moving.
I remembered that when Su Dongpo was demoted to Huangzhou, he met his old friend Chen Yu. At that time, Chen Yu came to the meeting with an old man surnamed Wang, who was also said to have been expelled to Huangzhou as an official when he was young and died here, known as Wang Changchang and Mr. Wang but not named. Dongpo asked Mr. Wang how long it had been since he had been in Huangzhou, and the old man said: It has been thirty-three years. Su Dongpo then gave the "Man Ting Fang" a poem, starting with yun: "Thirty-three years, who survives now?" Count only Jun and the Yangtze River. When I first read this sentence, I was weeping with sorrow, almost unable to help myself, and deeply felt the cruelty of this sentence. However, from the time when Su Shi was chanting, it has been more than a thousand years, and now, when we seriously ask, "Who survives today?" At the time, the answer was: "Count only the Yangtze River." The mighty rivers, the people of the ages, the past, the journey of tens of millions of people, have long been exhausted. The image of the Yangtze River has appeared in Su Dongpo's poems again and again, inspiring him to pay attention to history and life with a broad and transcendent embrace, when a person faces the infinite scale of the universe of heaven and earth, his own honor and humiliation are poor and he sighs!
Every river has a dream: to run to the sea. The Yangtze River and the Yellow River all rushed to the sea, in different ways. The Yangtze River splits the mountain and opens the way, the Yellow River twists and turns, the trajectory is different, but there is a spirit of water. Contemporary Chinese, in the course of nearly a hundred years of closure, from the mid-to-late 1990s of the last century, a new economic situation and way of life have emerged, and people have suddenly entered rivers, lakes and seas from the original narrow radius of life, which is a huge change for the entire nation. How to reset yourself and others in this change, everyone may be both hot and helpless.
The green mountains are faintly undulating, and the rivers are thousands of miles away. In this era of rushing rivers, none of us know what will happen tomorrow. The only thing we can do is to be ready at all times, with the autonomous movement of small particles, into the rolling torrent of the times. The world is changing dramatically, and changing is the only way – even if you don't change, everything you face has changed. The earth leans on the riverbank, the sound of the water changes softly, this is the era we are in, we can sigh the river to the east, but there is no way to stop the mighty tide.