laitimes

In order to avoid becoming a layman, this group of literati from four hundred years ago built an elegant house of cards

What about the elderly? Superfluous things also. Cold can not be clothed, hungry can not eat, can be described as useless things. And the good of the scribes, the rush to the flock, said that it is not this can not be said to be tasteful, there is no such indescribable elegance. belch! Strange, of course. However, man is different from the beast, and the one who is different from the beast, the one who is different, is precisely the one who can turn useless things into usefulness.

Although the long object is not enough to cover the body, it is enough to cover the vulgarity; although it is not enough to feed the stomach, it can nourish the heart. Although it is a literati reward, it is also enough to entertain the eyes and ears, go to lead Hua Powder, and you can also watch the wind and moon boundless. Although it is idle in the world, it is indispensable to be a long thing, and to look at the rhyme of people and to think of the gods.

However, if what is asked is too much, what is desired is excessive, what is useless is not useful, and what is harmful to practical work is to talk about it, then although the long thing is a water moon, it can also be turned into a flame poison, and the more you love it, the more painful it is to burn yourself.

The characters of the mountains and rivers are all phantoms; outside of the body, they are all long things.

This article is from B02-B03 of the Beijing News Book Review Weekly's March 25 feature "Long Things".

"Theme" B01 丨 Long Object

"Theme" B02-B03 丨 The birth of a way of life

"Theme" B04-B05 丨Pinwu Travel Heart The universe of infinite travel of the mind

"Literature" B06-B07丨The Desert and the Ashes: Edmund Abbots' Book of Problems

"Art" B08 丨 "Antonin Aalto" A labyrinth that is difficult to enter and cannot get out

Written by | Lee Shane

nightmare. The teenager woke up from a dream. Tears pierced the screen of dreams and reality.

Looking up, the familiar bed, the familiar drapery, everything seems to be no different from the past. But in the dream, everything familiar became very strange: a foreign body with a length of body, standing outside the drapery, hair scattered, naked, and most frighteningly, its face, mixed with dense dots of powder and ink. It stood in front of the tent like this, its eyes shining, forcing itself to look at itself. Just when he was shocked, he found that under the bed, there was even a foreign body with a face that looked like this, with the same wide eyes, shooting at people, claiming to take his own life.

The nightmare of June 29, 1638, was of great significance to the venture, and he was 28 years old, which was a great time to enjoy life. Many brilliant dreams are waiting in line for the opportunity to become a reality, and his origin is enough to provide realistic paving material for the dreams he embraces. The Mao clan is a famous giant clan of Rugao, whose ancestors have been officials for generations, and their ancestors and fathers have all held important local positions. Mao Peijiang also accompanied the side since childhood, "reminiscing about the past childhood, he traveled magnificently, and passed the foothills of Wu Chushu", at the age of twelve, he was praised for his articles, and at the age of fourteen, he was integrated into "XiangLi Garden", and Dong Qichang, a literary elder in the famous sea, wrote a preface for him: "When he was fourteen years old, he was already a famous artist"--although such a praise is excessively prestigious, it can also be seen that with his outstanding talent and the social network of the Mao family, it is enough to make Mao Peijiang young, You can climb to a social class that most of your peers can't reach.

The prosperous scene of Nanjing in the Ming Dynasty's anonym "Nandu Fan Map".

"Talent" and "youth fame" are the two most important keywords to date. Dreams are becoming a reality step by step, but are they really going to be brutally interrupted by this sudden nightmare? For today's people who hold the wisdom of the future, the answer to this question is certainly not suspenseful - not only has he not been killed by a nightmare foreign object, but his life has become more and more brilliant. In the following year of this nightmare, Mao Peijiang, in an almost ostentatious posture, came to the ancient capital of Nanjing, where "the vegetable maid bartenders all brought the smoke and water vapor of the Six Dynasties", to take the exam. His close friend Chen Qinian described the triumphant venture of the frontier at that time, "riding a car, passing guests, especially xi and Tongcheng, Jiashan orphans, traveling will be wine, summoning song and dance", his demeanor is implicit, Tuna wind, like a noble prince and grandson. Also in this year, he met his future confidant, Dong Xiaowan, a famous prostitute of a generation- this will surely become a noisy love for future generations, and gradually ripple on the Qinhuai River, where the fat powder is swollen. When Dong Xiaowan wore a Western faded red light shirt as thin as cicada yarn, he accompanied the expedition hand in hand with the adventurous frontier, "Guan Du crossed the most victorious place in the Jiangshan, and tens of millions of people rushed to embrace it, saying that Jiang Fei took the doll, and stepped on the waves to march up."

"Maozi decorates the car, fresh clothes, pearl tree branches, light moves left and right, gives a taste of amazement, and thinks that he is a god among the gods" - just as his friend and Jiangnan celebrity Chen Hu was amazed, the origin, talent, and style of the impostor of the frontier, and perhaps the luck of the times, so that he can enjoy the exquisite and elegant life of the gods in the red dust world. All of this makes the frontier a model of the scribe's art of living and taste. His light and left appearance is enough to satisfy today's admiration and imagination of that elegant era. Venturing into xinjiang can be described as the dream of that era. And that era, for a scribe like Mao Peijiang, was also an era of elegant dreams—as long as the dream did not wake up too early.

"Portrait of Xizhi" is from the Ming Dynasty painter Qiu Ying's "TianlaiGe Imitation Song People's Album", which is a typical scene of scribes' study, tea, incense, potted flowers, books and guqin, representing the scribe's life taste.

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Elegant battle

To make dreams come true, it is not only necessary to fantasize, but also to give fantasies to those real things, to make them look so exquisite and elegant as in dreams. Wen Zhenheng is such a person who focuses on dreaming. Just four years before the nightmare of breaking new frontiers, the Suzhou scribe published his painstakingly written work, The Chronicle of Long Things. As soon as the book came out, it became a popular work among the scribes of the time, and even after four hundred years, it was still famous and read countless times.

Although the "Chronicles of Long Things" can be classified as a popular essay sketch at the time in terms of genre, in terms of content, it is a connoisseur manual. Teach the reader how to properly appreciate and design things that conform to the elegant and exquisite life taste of the scribes. Wen Zhenheng was very delicately divided into twelve volumes according to the room, flowers and trees, water stones, poultry and fish, calligraphy and painting, several beds, utensils, clothing, boats, cars, locations, vegetables and fruits, and fragrant tea, which almost included various categories of clothing, food, housing, and transportation. In each category, he is careful and detailed, accurate to the point of not getting tired of being harsh.

Wen Zhengming's "Lanting Xiuyu Map", Wang Xizhi's Lanting Xiuyu is a model of elegant life in the minds of Ming Dynasty scribes.

From size to decoration to shape, everything is described in detail, which makes people suspect that the author is an antique furniture shopping guide with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. And this is the most distinctive point of Wen Zhenheng's "Chronicles of Long Things", it is not as fond of side-reading as the previous appreciation manuals, but the most specific and detailed descriptions are packed into the hands of readers with the most elegant writing of the scribes. Although for the reader, such a detailed description does help to draw the gourd in the same way. However, it is also possible to read a kind of arbitrariness that the author has no doubt about his own taste.

Wen Zhenheng has capital in the elegant and domineering style of his scribes, and his origin is the same as that of the maojiang, which is a family family. However, to some extent, Wen Zhenheng has more family roots in the style of scribes and elegance than in the style of mao. The Wen family was well-known in the Jiangnan region, and his great-grandfather was Wen Zhengming, the most famous master of the Ming Dynasty. Calligraphy and painting were not only famous at that time, but also spread to future generations, so that in the era of Wen Zhenheng, many painters in Suzhou made profits by selling calligraphy and paintings that forged Wen Zhengming, and the cost was not expensive. Since the fall of Wen Zhengming, the Wen family has been adept at painting and calligraphy. Wen Zhenheng himself was also an extremely outstanding calligrapher and painter. And his appearance is also worthy of his elegant status, "long jade standing, good at self-standardization, so that the windows will be clear and clean, sweeping the floor and burning incense." He is a model scribe who is no less than a man among the gods.

Although there is no evidence that Wen Zhenheng and Mao Peijiang had any contact with each other, as the most prestigious scribe at that time, the elegant taste between the two naturally had a sympathetic point. Tea, as an indispensable object in the life of a scribe, is naturally described in detail in the Chronicle of Long Things. Wen Zhenheng believes that tea varieties are "the best of taste, headed by Shen Xiang and Yin Tea", and this is precisely the tea that Dong Xiaowan, a confidant of Mao Peijiang and his red face, is the most addictive tea.

The portrait of Wen Zhenheng is from the title page of the Qing carved "Chronicle of Long Things"

Wen Zhenheng's taste is unquestionable, and it is enough to be called a representative of the elegant taste of the scribes, so it is understandable why he does not bother to quote from his own books, because he himself is already an authority. And these artifacts, which he describes so harshly, thoughtfully, and unquestionably in his book, are, as the title suggests, "long things."

"Long things" are superfluous things that are not necessary for life. As the preface to the book says, the things mentioned in the book are "cold and inedible", so "idle in the world, long things in the body". Even if you don't know anything about the contents of this book, life can go on as usual, and the days can be as usual, without any disturbance. But with the guidance of this book, the ordinary life day after day will be endowed with a scribe's elegant taste, which can be used to set a high standard, can be used to taste the charm, and can be used to show talent.

Dehua kiln white porcelain flowers, Wang Tianxiang collection. Dehua is located in eastern Fujian, since the Ming Dynasty Longqing, Wanli, everyone knows the learning, the reputation is gradually broadening, and the cultural relics have become prosperous. It is fired white porcelain, porcelain white, inexpensive and good style. This flower that imitates the style of ancient bronze is used as a decorative offering because the Ming Dynasty officials ordered that all folk sacrifice vessels use porcelain. However, in the late Ming Dynasty, the Shanggu style was popular, and this kind of Dehua white porcelain antique porcelain was also used as a flower arrangement for the furnishings in the study.

Long things are indeed superfluous, but they are not useless. It is a dividing line that distinguishes the ordinary from the elegant and exquisite, and the only criterion for the division is whether to pay attention to these superfluous "long things" - only the scribes who are committed to an elegant life are qualified to taste and pursue these superfluous long things, and ordinary people are either too mentally strong or because they do not enter the elegant and elegant.

This is why, in the eyes of enthusiastic fans, "Long Things" is more like a practical manual, teaching readers how to fight the vulgar and ultimately achieve elegant victory. The representatives of vulgarity are those ridiculed in the preface to the Chronicle of Long Things, "rich and noble families and one or two philistine slaves and blunt men." They "pretend to be good deeds, and every time they are appreciated, they export the customs and are rough when they start", even if they are those elegant things, once they are protected by their Mozi, they "insult them"—they have defiled the reputation of "Ya", so that "true rhymes, true talents, and true lovers will not talk about elegance", and they have also reduced long things from elegant things to worldly things. Therefore, one of the purposes of this book is to save grace from the insults of these vulgar upstarts.

Wang Jiansheng, played by Wang Tianxiang in "Three Mountains Old Dream", is dividing tea with candles. The leisure and elegance of the scribes in the late Ming Dynasty in the 17th century, although it has gone through four centuries, still has endless charm today, making people imitate and follow, as if reliving old dreams.

Such a tone sounds quite heroic and cynical about saving beauty, in order to save elegant long things, at the expense of completely offending those "rich and noble families" and "philistine slaves", but in fact, this is a common trick of this type of reading, as early as three centuries ago in the early years of the Ming Dynasty, a connoisseur manual "Gegu Essentials" already had such a tone to talk about the taste of appreciation recommended by himself, but the tone was much more euphemistic: "I have tasted the ancient people who have learned to clean things in recent times, but although their hearts love it, they have not yet seen it." ”

The Treatise on the Essentials of Gegu can be said to be one of the many originators of the Chronicle of The Long Things. Later, lu shen's "Records of Ancient Qi Instruments" written in 1508, Gao Lian's popular best-selling "Zunsheng Eight Notes" written in 1590, and another scribe Tu Long's "Examination of the Rest of the Matter" written by another scribe who preceded Wen Zhenheng can all be included in this genealogy, the purpose of which is to teach people how to live gracefully and leisurely, while also expressing the necessary regret or indignation at the prevailing vulgarity or euphemism, or fierceness.

Whether it is regret or indignation, this deliberate offense to vulgarity is, to some extent, a deliberate marketing tactic: no one wants to be an insult to the rich and the upstart who insults and desecrates elegance, and in order to avoid falling into the quagmire of vulgarity without paying attention, read this book.

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Taste extravagant

Avoid becoming a layman, this anxiety mentality, is common in any era, and books such as "Long Things" cater to this anxiety. The late Ming era in the middle of the 17th century, in which Wen Zhenheng lived, was precisely an era when this anxiety reached its extreme. Especially in the jiangnan land where he is located, this anxiety is increasing day by day, and the source of anxiety is the high growth of material consumption, forming a luxurious wind.

Some keen observers perceive that this extravagance began to emerge during the Jiajing period at the end of the 16th century. The Matsue scribe He Liangjun recalled the banquet of his youth, "It was just five colors of fruit and five products of food." However, when the guest or the new relative passes through the door, he adds three or four shrimp, crabs, clams, and not once or twice in his old age", but in his old age, what he sees is "now the ordinary swallow meeting, often with ten dishes, and the water and land are old, or looking for distant treasures, seeking to be left.". By the beginning of the 17th century, in the Wanli era, this extravagance was unabated.

The inner garden veranda in the Ming dynasty "The Book of Pipa".

The appetite can be exhausted all over the world, the clothes on the body, but also more and more gorgeous, the 17th century Nanjing scribe Gu Qiyuan, in the "Guest Commentary" recorded that when he was young, the street is mostly seen in cloth clothes, rare silk clothes, but now "when they come, there are more people who wear silk, and there are fewer people who wear cloth clothes." In Changshu, Suzhou, in the past, the clothes of the city were mostly coarse cloth, "now it is summer and more yarn valley, winter or heavy fur". Furniture furnishings have shifted from coarse wood furniture to fine wood furniture. Fan Lian, a native of Songjiang, wrote that when he was a teenager, the fine wood furniture "was not seen", and the folk furniture "stopped having a square table with ginkgo biloba gold paint". Today's "luxury", "where the bed cabinet and a few tables, are made of pear, gall wood, ebony, acacia wood and boxwood, extremely expensive, moving costs thousands of dollars, but also a customary luxury." ”

On the surface, such a lavish trend of throwing tens of thousands of dollars is precisely the rich and noble family and philistine slave style that "The Chronicle of Long Things" focuses on criticizing. They spend money like dirt, compete for wealth, but only buy the word vulgar. However, what "Chronicles of Long Things" flaunts is "the meaning of deleting complexity and removing luxury". Words such as "rather frugality and no vulgarity" can be found everywhere in the book, warning the reader that extravagance is synonymous with vulgarity.

But is that really the case? As stated in the preface to the Chronicle of Long Things, the reason why a long thing is a long thing is precisely because it is a superfluous thing other than the necessities of life, and it must be an increase in heeling on top of simplicity. Wen Zhenheng's requirements for the screen in "The Chronicle of Long Things" can be seen. He wrote that the screen "is precious to those who are finely set in marble, and the second is Qiyang stone, and the second is huarui stone; those who must not be old must also imitate the old style." The marble screen that Wen Zhenheng highly admired in the Ming Dynasty can be said to be synonymous with the luxury of the powerful, and the property list of the mansion of Yan Song, the adulterous minister of the Ming Dynasty, lists a large number of exquisitely carved marble screens. The best quality marble is a tribute for the royal family. In order to mine this kind of colorful stone, from the mountains of Yunnan to the official road of the Beijing Division, people and horses were killed and injured. However, compared with the marble screen, the simple and luxurious paper paste screen and wooden screen that are not so deep, Wen Zhenheng scoffed: "It is not in the product." ”

The elegant living of the scribes also does not reject the extravagant fine wood. Wen Zhenheng specifically mentioned the bed that meets the elegant taste, "with the Song and Yuan broken pattern small lacquer beds as the first, the second time the single sleeping bed made by the Inner House, and the second time the small wooden master craftsman author, also available" - anyone who understands the price of antique furniture in the late Ming Dynasty will know that the Song and Yuan broken pattern small lacquer beds of five or six hundred years ago, which Wen Zhenheng admired, are so difficult to find. You will also know that the small wooden (fine wood) bed made by the master craftsman is worth the price of a year's income in the middle of the family. The bookshelf that is indispensable for the reader must also be antiques or carefully crafted by masters, "a market object, a medicine room object, both are not available" - these mass-produced furniture can be seen everywhere on the market, although simple and cheap, but - it is still that evaluation, too vulgar.

Black lacquer inlaid spiral pavilion landscape interstitial screen, late Ming dynasty works. This type of black lacquer screen inlaid with screws, although regarded as a common object by Wen Zhenheng, was widely popular in the 17th century. The picture is from "Pin Wu Yu Xin".

We have to ask, then, the question: what is the purpose of the extravagance that the scribes oppose in the name of elegance? From the point of view of good antiquities and rejection of market goods, the class of scribes formed by Wen Zhenheng, in the name of elegance, is a kind of luxury concocted by the consumerist market, which is manifested as a kind of show of wealth that is visible to the naked eye. Like a few cases made of gold and precious stones, it is filled with the smell of copper that makes the elegant scribes cover their noses. However, if this desk is replaced by a natural case made of pear, iron pear, and fragrant nan wood, and slightly carved with a cloud head and a ruyi pattern, although such a few cases cost no less than ten thousand gold, it successfully covers up the smell of copper that it has spent a lot of money with its elegant and simple posture. The three generations of Ding Yi who were furnished on several cases were full of bronze and green, and although it was possible that they could not be bought at a square table in the market by smelting them into copper coins, they were simply placed there, indicating the extraordinary value of the owner.

The true meaning of the so-called "long things" is not to reject luxury, but to make luxury less obvious, and to use deliberate frugality to make people have an illusion of elegance. This is the usefulness of long things as superfluous things, and the so-called elegance may be just a synonym for superfluous. The so-called superfluous is just an elegant excuse for extravagance.

In this way, the promotion of long things also seems to be a hypocrisy. However, it is still the sentence in the preface of the "Chronicle of Long Things": "Abundance and frugality are different, always do not hinder the way, its rhyme is talented, and the government cannot hide its ears", in the most popular words, it is "who uses who knows".

Binaural four-legged bronze furnace, Wang Tianxiang tibetan. This object is an antique Ding furnace made of imitation Shang Zhou bronzes, since the Northern Song Dynasty gold and stone science flourished, the scholar class was widely collected for three generations of Ding Yi, and a number of antique bronzes also appeared as a few cases of decoration to play with. The form of this Ding furnace is almost the same as that of the Ding Furnace excavated from the Southern Song Tomb in Wenzhou, and the casting era was also at the time of the Song and Yuan Dynasties. In the late Ming Dynasty, the scholars were still in tibet. Ming Dynasty Gao Lian's "Eight Notes on Zunsheng" said that in the small number of beds at the head of the bed, "or place a Ding furnace one", this kind of Ding furnace should be especially mozi at all times, and the late Ming connoisseur Zhang Ugly commented on the appreciation of antiquities cloud: "The appraiser evaluates the copper and jade research stone, and it will be precious to wrap the pulp." Who is the pulper? Tezawa is also. ”

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Nightmare Dreams

To live in such a home environment must be a dream. But you might as well turn around and walk out of the elegant study of a few dingyi furnishings, out of the pavilions surrounded by mountains and rivers, and look at the world beyond the elegant glitz of this long pile. If you remember the gruesome nightmare mentioned at the beginning. This nightmare is a microcosm of the real world beyond the long things.

At the end of the year, his eldest son suddenly contracted acne and died of a violent illness ten days later. Shortly thereafter, his seventeen-year-old cousin also suffered from acne and died on the fifteenth day of the first month of the following year. When the two died, because "the face was black and sunken, the family smeared it with powder and medicine, and when they died, the hair knot could not be combed", just like the two foreign body shapes in the nightmare of "long and long, naked, and small spots of flour and ink".

The nightmare came true, so strange and strange, it really sounded incredible in addition to the shock. But in fact, the nightmare of breaking through the frontier is not so much a ghost and a ghost, but rather a portrayal of the dreams of the epidemic in Jiangnan at that time. Pox, the so-called smallpox, broke out in north China in 1637, all the way south, besieging the city and pulling down the county, straight to Jiangnan. Jiaqing's "Chronicle of Rugao County" has only one sentence to record this terrible plague that took tens of millions of lives: "Eleven years of Chongzhen, great drought, hunger, and epidemic." At that time, the main means of treating smallpox was to smear smallpox acne with medicinal powder, and to break away from foreign bodies with small spots of powder and ink in dreams, which were not so much ghosts and gods who signed the signs of meditation in night dreams, but rather patients infected with smallpox during the day.

Displaced victims in Shen Zhou's "Map of Displaced Persons" in the Ming Dynasty.

Looking down from the clouds of the dreams of the immortals, he would see another nightmarish world besides the prosperity of gold powder, and he did witness the nightmare like the ink that was poured open, and the unscrupulous flow on the map. Just a few months before he was praised by Chen Hu as a "god among the gods", he had just traveled more than three thousand miles from the rugao cape to Hengyang to visit his parents. Along the way, what you see is dotted with jiangnan splendid embroidery, which is full of starving corpses. In his hometown of RugaoLibei Township, there were fifteen hungry people, who stayed in the canopy of the car overnight, seven people hanged themselves in Tianming, and five people froze and starved to death. The boat traveled to Yangzhou in February, but "there was heavy snow, displaced people, hungry and cold, yellow and black, like leaves like ink like jiaotong, a servant could not get up, those who walked along the wall, their mouths were silent, thousands of people died in the four doors, and corpses slept with each other." At the place where the boat was moored, I saw the "mountain of corpses", a dilapidated stable nearby, and the ground was not full, "thirty years old and eighty-one people died". Dressed in mink fur, he saw a couple who were only covered with a mat, hugging and weeping, they were Gaoyou people, who had been living here, and their mother had died three days ago, but they had no money to buy a coffin for burial. He rushed to donate money to mourn. But looking around, there were mountains of corpses, starvation everywhere, and his own dreams were also lost in nightmares.

The scene of civilians fleeing is from the Ming Dynasty's "Wukou Tu Scroll".

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Long stuff only

"To this day, I have nothing else to blame." Mao Pujiang wrote in his diary on this day. Just like a satirical fable, on the same day, Jiang Kaixian, the leader of Yangzhou's literary circles, because of the completion of his new residence, held a feast and invited him to visit the garden at the lanterns. Although he was at the feast, Ge Ji, who was facing the wine, raised his eyebrows and fidgeted. But others around them are accustomed to it and indulge in joy. But in a way, all this that made the risk of the frontier and the eyebrows raised was part of his habit of exquisite life as an elegant scribe. His restlessness, in a sense, like the nightmare of his 28-year-old, was only a sinister episode that temporarily interrupted his youthful glitzy dreams. In the light of sheng ge, he is still a "god among the gods" who "moves left and right" in the eyes of all the scribes.

The dreams and nightmares of venturing out of frontiers are just like the portrayal of the era in which he lived. Two years after this feast, the Ming Dynasty, which had ventured to flee to Si, collapsed. In the midst of the chaos of the war, He Found himself the protagonist of the nightmare of the past. Rugao County has been turned into a tiger and wolf lair, "a group of people robbed day by day, killing people like grass", although he was out of danger, but "most of his bags were scattered", his beloved Dong Xiaowan "cherished and lost", since then, the Family of Maoqiao Has "all wandered to the deep forest and remote roads, huts and fishing boats, or a migration of the month, or a day, or a few migrations, hunger and cold wind and rain, suffering is not described" - this noble prince finally felt the pain of those hungry beggars he saw when he docked in Yangzhou in the past, and death was also chased by him with a sword behind his head. In an encounter with the rebel army, more than twenty of his servants and maids were killed and plundered, and although he and Dong Xiaowan were lucky to escape, "the playthings and clothes stored in their lives were left behind!" ”

In order to avoid becoming a layman, this group of literati from four hundred years ago built an elegant house of cards

The portrait of Mao Pujiang in the Biography of a Scholar in the Qing Dynasty.

Compared with their own lives, these life-saving playthings are nothing more than long things outside the body. They are like a magnolia that blooms in mid-spring. However, although the branches are full of spring and splendid embroidery, the roots of the tree have decayed, the trunk has rotted, and as long as there is a few winds and snow, the tree will fall and fall. The flowers that bloom will fall and drift to dust – perhaps, the reason why these flowers bloom so brilliantly is precisely because they have squeezed out the nutrients of the roots and trunks to whitewash their delicate posture – but before that, all one could see was this good flower.

Even if it eventually withers, there is only the grace and elegance of the falling flowers in the eyes.

However, this is only a long thing.

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