Qianjiang Evening News Hourly News Reporter Zhang Mijia
Shan Hao "No Dots", 135X140CM Oil on canvas, 2018
Life has always been a rush. Far and near.
At a time when people are crossing mountains and mountains for life, the "spring breeze small desk" of our department has begun to flow in the city again. The small desk is today in the Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital affiliated to Zhejiang University School of Medicine, a place where new life may be born at every moment.
By the wall of the obstetric room, it was a very plain wooden table with a chair; on the table there was a small lamp shining with warm light, a clock. When people lie down at their desks, they are surrounded by a safe "wall"—a shelf full of books on the table.
In front of this small table, in this small corner of the chaotic space, the noise of the world will suddenly disappear, and the impatient self will quiet down.
Colleagues sent a very touching circle of friends: "Spring breeze for ten years, just to put a quiet little desk in the human world." ”
"Chunfeng Small Desk" is a sub-activity of Qianjiang Evening News's ten-year brand "Chunfeng Yue Reading Festival". Every spring, small desks will be in the city's neighborhoods, schools, parks... All kinds of places you want to get unexpected (this year the small desk "drifted" to the waiting room), and invited to fully share the "happy reading".
The American writer Carson McCullers (1917-1967) had a work called "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter", and she wrote about a kind of "quiet room".
There are two mutes in the town and they are always together. Every morning, they came out of their homes and walked arm in arm to get to work. Walking in front was Fat Anthony, followed by Dumb Singh.
But one day, Anthony had a mental problem and he was sent to a mental hospital. Singh was left alone.
People found that Singer was very good to get along with. So one after another people came to talk to the dumb. The young workers approached him to complain about inequality between the rich and the poor; the black doctor, who did not get along well with his children, talked to him about "blacks should have fewer children and attach importance to education." Dumb listened patiently and would write small notes asking him questions.
Chatting with Dumb Bassinger was a little girl named Mick, thirteen or fourteen years old, who usually had to go to school, take care of her younger siblings at home, who loved music, wanted to play the piano, and wanted to write a song herself. Mick made a distinction between "outhouse" and "backhouse." All the chores she had to deal with were in the "outhouse"; the music that echoed in her heart, the words she said to Dumb Singh, were in the "outhouse". As long as the "outhouse" stuff doesn't interfere with the "inside", the cruel life can always be dealt with.
Mick in the movie Heart is a Lonely Hunter Image source: alchetron
But what is very sad about this novel is that later the Mick family has changed, and she owes a lot of money, and she has to go out to earn money to support the family. When the little girl found that her "back room" was about to collapse, she desperately counted how many roses there were on the wallpaper and how many grass blades were in the backyard, and she wanted the numbers to occupy her brain so that she would not mourn the collapse of the "back room". Then she went on eating breakfast, going to work, coming home, eating dinner, and going to bed. She had no time to write songs, couldn't play the piano, "back room", and was locked up far away.
When we need to do our best to cope with the life in front of us, it is difficult to have a rich spiritual life in such a situation.
When we can't be quiet, the noise doesn't necessarily come from the outside, it may be in our minds—restless thoughts, talking to ourselves.
There's an American sound ecologist named Gordon Hempton, who did a project called "One Square Inch of Silence."
He found a stone in Washington State's Olympic National Park to document and maintain the silence around it. Silence does not mean that something does not exist, but that everything exists. It exists uninterrupted, just like time, and we can feel it if we just open our hearts. ”
Silence nourishes our essence, the essence of humanity. As our hearts become more receptive to things and our ears become sharper, we are not only better at listening to the sounds of nature, but also more likely to listen to our own voices, each other's voices.
A redstone lying in the rainforest.
Gorton monitors for intrusion or possible intrusion noise around redstone. He recorded the time, decibels, and the source, and then contacted the makers of the relevant noise, preached them about the scarce qualities of silence in this age, and attached a CD documenting the situation before and after nature was invaded by noise, imploring them to restrain themselves.
Image source: Sohu
At 3 a.m. on September 3, 1786, the 37-year-old Goethe packed his bags, got into a mail truck alone, and fled to Italy.
He fled not because he was cornered; rather, Goethe was a public official in the Weimar Republic at the time. But he found that his life was unconsciously put on a cog: busy with government affairs during the day, writing some love poems in his spare time, and life had long squeezed the enthusiasm for creation to dry up.
Goethe had a simple intuition: This is not going to work. He therefore abandoned everything and fled to the utopia of his mind, Italy. He lived there for a year and nine months, traveling all over Italy, from the city to the countryside, joyfully witnessing and describing things like the hardness of rocks, the elasticity of the air.
Goethe completed Iphigna in Tauris in Italy and wrote parts of Tasso and Faust. Italy saved him and pulled him off the gears of fate of a vassal-like civil servant.
On November 4, 1786, Goethe wrote a letter to his mother in Rome, in which he said, "I will return as a new man." ”
The reborn Goethe did not become a newcomer, he just became more like himself.
Image source: penguin
Finally, a little bit about the support of this "room".
This year marks the 140th anniversary of the birth of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Mrs. Woolf's famous quote says, "A woman needs a room of her own, and a little money." "Women need a separate space of their own – physical, spiritual – to run their own lives.
Equally beautiful is Madame's statement about money. She said more politely that women need "a little bit of money". However, in October 1928, when Woolf was invited to give a lecture at Cambridge University on the topic of "Women and fiction", a student asked her: "How much is a little money?" She said: "£500 a year. "At the time, British workers earned just a dozen pounds a month.
Men must agree with this proposition.
Before Mrs. Woolf spoke of the importance of the economy, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) said: "I realized when I was young that money was important, and when I was old I found that it was." ”
Ogilvy's founder, David MacKenzie Ogilvy (1911-1999), often taught his employees the story of composer Sergei Vassilievitch Rachmaninoff (1873-1943):
A friend asked Rachmaninoff that when he performed at Carnegie Hall, he would often see Rachmaninoff looking in the direction of the audience. His friend asked, "At that moment, was there any particularly lofty idea in your mind that was influencing your musical philosophy?" ”
"I count the number of people in the hall." Rachmaninoff was very concerned about how many people came to his concerts. This statement is both self-deprecating and very true, "If your creativity is not tested and recognized by more people, creativity is depleted or meaningless." ”
David Ogilvy often tells employees, "While advertising agencies are creative, you need to enjoy making money." ”
In short, I hope that every ordinary person who has gone through hardships and tribulations, we will have some way to always have a room of our own, a small desk of our own. Good night.
Click here to listen to the concurrent podcast
Podcast host
Chen Yuhao, Qianjiang Evening News hourly news reporter, is also an independent singer-songwriter, songwriter, not too old man band member, representative works include "Skydiving on the Elevated Highway", "Endless" and so on.
Collaborating artists
Shan Hao, Deputy Secretary-General of Ningbo Artists Association, Director of Single Art Notes. Graduated from the Oil Painting Department of China Academy of Art, his representative works include the "Upward Growth" series and the "Paper Man" series.
【Recommended Book List】
Virginia Woolf, "One Man's Room"
David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man
Carson McCullers, "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter"
Gordon Hampton, "A Square Inch of Silence"
【Recommended Song List】
Penny Dai, "One Man's Luggage"
Coldplay《Army of One》
【Past Stories】
Bedtime stories| Hangzhou girls, tough ladies
Bedtime stories| are pretty old
Bedtime stories | rolling balls and painful buttons
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