Liang Heng: Reading high-level books can change lives

Liang Heng, graduated from Peking University, is currently the deputy editor-in-chief of People's Daily, and his "Jinci Temple" and "Where to Cross the Ferry" written by him have been selected as middle school Chinese textbooks. On April 23, 2006, at the opening ceremony of the "World Book Day" event at Xinhua Bookstore in Wangfujing, Beijing, Liang Heng gave this speech. Books are endless, life is limited, how can you better allocate your time to enjoy books and change your life? In his speech, Liang Heng divided reading into six levels and believed that reading books at different levels can change lives.

The book is a thing specially prepared for people who know how to enjoy the spirit and have the spirit to be enterprising. Before humans on earth, plants and trees died on their own, birds and beasts came from within, and the prehistoric world was regulated by material ecological nature. Ever since there were humans, another regulatory system has emerged—the mental system. In this system, people do not pursue food, clothing, and housing, but information, knowledge, ideas, art, etc. The most important carrier of these spiritual wealth is books.

Books have two major roles, one is to shape people, and the other is to inherit culture for society. Let's talk about the relationship between books and people.

Why do people read? In a word, for the integrity of life. Or to recover the other half's life.

Reading is for the integrity of life

Why do people read? In a word, for the integrity of life. Or to recover the other half's life. It's popular now to say half and half. "Half is seawater, half is flame", "Half of men are women", in fact, the most fundamental, half of human life is material, half is spiritual. Reading is an energetic supplement to the spiritual half of life. Of all the species on Earth, it is human beings who need spiritual nourishment in addition to material things. Only people, with a spiritual life and subjective thinking, will transform the objective and pursue happiness.

It's a true story that's been broadcast on TV. Someone asked a sheep herding baby in the western region, why do you want to herd sheep? The shepherd said, earn money; what do you do with money? Marry a wife; what does it do to marry a wife? What do you do with a baby? Sheep. You see, what is such a simple loop? It is to survive and complete the simple reproduction of the population. This is only half the value of human life.

As a human being, the other half is more important, that is, he has a spiritual world. Joy, anger, sorrow, happiness, seven emotions and six desires, ideal pursuit, etc. Marx defined man as the sum of all relations of production. The relationship between people is not mainly material exchanges, but spiritual exchanges. Conversation, letters, affection, love, politics, scholarship, art, etc., are all spiritual activities. Children only know that good food is the most important, and as soon as people enter adulthood, they will find that spiritual satisfaction is more important and the spiritual world is broader. That's why we sing for love, fight for freedom, and dedicate ourselves to ideals. Love, freedom, ideals, knowledge, art, etc., rely on what to communicate and inherit? The main carrier is books.

To truly have a sense, to have understanding, to have creativity, to change one's life, to achieve a career, to have a personality, to stand on one's own feet in the sea of people, and to flow in the history of youth, we must rely on the study of the last three levels.

There are six levels of reading

So, how can people realize the value of the other half of their lives and build a spiritual world? There are six levels and three pillars. That is, the six basic pursuits of people's reading, the pursuit of stimulation, leisure, information, knowledge, thought and beauty, of which knowledge, thought and aesthetics are the three pillars. These six levels, from low to high, reflect people's different levels of education, cultivation status and value orientation.

The first is to stimulate demand. In the spiritual life of normal people, there are always attempts to change the calm, pursue the strange, and find the stimulating side. This demand is not so much a spiritual pursuit as a psychophysical pursuit, because there are not many elements of rationality. Under the stimulus demand, there will be illegal publication markets such as yellow and low-grade publications. This also shows that people have a natural side.

The second is the demand for leisure and entertainment. According to this demand, a kind of relaxed works have been produced, such as flowers, fish and insects, fashion, humor, stories, etc. Leisure and entertainment needs have the greatest coverage among readers, not only the leisure class relies on recreational reading to pass the time, but also professionals, but also often turn over books and newspapers for rest.

The third is information demand. With the modernization of society, people's demand for information is increasing. Everyone is inseparable from information in life, and it is not uncommon for a piece of information to make a decision successful, to save a business, or to make a person rich. So much so that information has evolved into an independent industry. This demand for information is the basis for the existence of books, newspapers, periodicals and other media, especially newspapers.

Although the above three needs are spiritual, it can still be seen that they are not free from material constraints, and most of them are practical needs. Its carriers are also newspapers, magazines, and television. The true spiritual level is the next three pillars, the carrier of which is mainly books.

The fourth is the need for knowledge. Knowledge is the sum of the knowledge and experience that people gain in the practice of transforming the world. Grain, vegetables, and meat make people grow from children to strong adults, and knowledge makes people smart and capable, and if there is no knowledge, they can only be counted as half a person. Therefore, a person's life is specially arranged for a student period, and the knowledge is received more intensively, and in the future, until the old age and death, the knowledge must be continuously supplemented and updated, which mainly depends on the books, newspapers, and periodicals published, especially books.

Fifth, aesthetic needs. Everyone has a heart for beauty. From the beginning of primitive man, human beings have learned the pursuit of beauty. This continuous development of this instinct has increased the aesthetic demand to call for publications to serve as a carrier to provide aesthetic objects, such as literary works, fine arts, etc., on the one hand, and as a tool to help guide people to improve their aesthetic ability on the other hand.

Sixth, ideological needs. The highest level of human spiritual needs is rational thinking. Stimulation is the satisfaction of psychological instincts, entertainment is psychological rest, information is the signal of things captured by people, knowledge has entered the summary of cognition, only thought can enter rationality, into the grasp of laws and methods, is people's deeper understanding of the objective world. This demand prompts people to read theoretical academic books and periodicals, to think about problems through the image and material of specific publications.

I advise friends who love to read, of course, it is very good to love reading, but we must also pay attention to the purpose and level of reading. We can roughly divide reading into two categories: one is the consumption type, for the sake of immediate practicality, and the other is the accumulation type, for long-term and fundamental improvement. The first three levels are consumption-oriented, and the last three levels are cumulative. Just like a country in addition to practical enterprises, there must also be energy, transportation and other basic projects. Only by working cumulative reading can we change our lives and create brilliance.

Mao Zedong listened to Aischi talk about philosophy and respectfully took notes. In the cave dwellings of Yan'an, Mao Zedong wrote famous articles such as "On Protracted War", "Theory of Contradiction", and "On Practice" under the oil lamp.

Great men love to read

Let's take a few examples.

Marx loved to read. He was originally participating in social production and the concrete workers' movement, but he felt that many things were not understood, that he did not understand and could not direct the movement, so he announced that he would withdraw from specific affairs and return to the study. He studied and wrote at the British Museum, and over time the stone slabs under his feet rubbed out a shallow ditch, just like the feet of the warrior monks left on the stone slabs of the Shaolin Temple. Marx spent 40 years of painstaking efforts to write Capital, and in order to write, he studied 1500 books before and after. Reading made Marx, and he became a great man of a generation.

Mao Zedong loved to read. The Yan'an period was the most arduous period of the Chinese Communist Party, with wars burning to the eyebrows and lack of food and clothing, but Mao Zedong also read philosophy and military studies, and made up for this important lesson. He listened to Aischi talk about philosophy and respectfully took notes. In the cave dwellings of Yan'an, Mao Zedong wrote famous articles such as "On Protracted War", "Theory of Contradiction", and "On Practice" under the oil lamp.

For me, Mr. Chen Wangdao's "Rhetoric studies" is a Bayankara Mountain, a watershed, which has achieved my news writing and my literary creation on the other.

Articles are not written for people to see, but should be written for people to memorize

Just now, a reporter asked me what I had experience in reading, how reading changed my life, in fact, each of us has such an experience. I originally studied archives at Chinese University, and when I graduated, I was just in time for the late "Cultural Revolution" to respond to the call to go to the north of the motherland, and I went to Inner Mongolia for a year as a farmer.

At this time, I read a book that had a great influence on my life, which is Mr. Chen Wangdao's "Rhetoric Studies Fa Fan". That's what I saw on the stove while I was pulling the bellows to cook, and the front and back of the book had been torn down several pages. Chen Wangdao was the first person in China to translate the Communist Manifesto, and in the early days he worked with Chen Duxiu to prepare for the Communist Party of China and help Chen Duxiu manage the funds, but Chen Duxiu's temper was very bad, chen Wangdao could not stand it, and left Chen Duxiu. This walk two people each broke out of the world. Chen Duxiu became one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, and Chen Wangdao was the first person to systematically study rhetoric in China. In this book he argues that rhetoric has positive rhetoric and negative rhetoric. Positive rhetorical language is vivid and metaphorical, and negative rhetorical language is relatively plain, such as legal terms, various textbooks, etc.

Of course, there are many other contents in this book, but the idea of two major rhetorical classifications has a great influence on my studies. Because I have long been a journalist and a writer, in an interview with the magazine, I said that Mr. Chen Wangdao's "Rhetoric Studies" is for me a Bayankara Mountain, a watershed, on the one hand, the Yangtze River, on the other side is the Yellow River; "Rhetoric Science Fa Fan" it has achieved my news writing on the one hand, and my literary creation on the other.

In addition, there was a copy of the "Selected Writings of The Dynasties" published by the China Youth Publishing House that also had a great influence on me, and later I found out that Mao Zedong also read this book. In his later years, because of cataracts, Mao Zedong had a hard time seeing things, so he asked his secretary to read the documents to him, and for the literature books, he found Lu Di, one of the editors of the book at that time, Chinese Min University, to read it to him. Mao Zedong's memory is very good, and in his later years he remembers the editor of the book he read, when Chinese min University had been abolished and merged into Peking University, so he brought her from Peking University.

Later, when I was a journalist, the book "Selected Writings of The Past Dynasties" was carried in my interview bag for many years, and I memorized the famous passages in my free time in the guest house, which had a great influence on the formation of my later journalistic language. I think that the language of news should be learned from ancient texts and telegrams, the language of news should be short and clean, and the ancient language should be very difficult to engrave on bamboo at the earliest, and the telegram should collect money according to numbers. Later, I wrote "Jinci Temple", more than 1600 words, which can be included in the middle school Chinese textbook, which is very related to this concept, because when I wrote it, I decided that my articles were not for people to read, but for people to memorize.

These jobs are 18,000 miles away from the archival major I originally studied, and the reason for this change is because of my later reading life. People don't know where to come across books that change their lives, as long as you read them.

In particular, the "History of History", its ideas, its praise and criticism of its characters, and its literary style still affect the Chinese nation today.

The accumulation of books affects the fortunes of a country

From the perspective of world history, there have been four major cultural accumulations, in fact, four major book publishing activities, which have had a great impact on the course of the world. This is the cultural accumulation of the ancient Greek and Roman periods; the cultural accumulation of the Renaissance; the cultural accumulation represented by the encyclopedic school in the European bourgeois Enlightenment in the middle of the 18th century; and the cultural accumulation of Marxism in the middle of the 19th century after summarizing british classical economics, German classical philosophy and French utopian socialism.

There have also been several major cultural accumulations in China's history. The first time was the early Han Dynasty's collation of pre-Qin culture. This accumulation determined the foundation of China's feudal society and basically determined the trend of Chinese history. It has produced an accumulative tome represented by the "Shi Ji" and the "Book of Han", especially the "Shi Ji", and its ideas, its praise and depreciation of characters, and its literary style still affect the Chinese nation today. The second was the Sui and Tang dynasties' collection of scattered books and the compilation of new books. It made Confucianism more mature and the feudal system further established. The third time was the accumulation of the Song Dynasty, confucianism developed to a new height of science, resulting in a master of Confucian theory such as Cheng Zhu, and a huge work summarizing the practice of governing the country such as the "Zizhi Tongjian", and the perfection of Confucianism ensured the continuation of the feudal system for the next 700 years. The fourth time is the Ming and Qing Dynasty Cultivation Books, represented by the achievements of the Yongle Canon and the Siku Quanshu. This cultural heritage plays an active role in the future development of our nation to this day. Later, kang liang and others introduced and accumulated Western culture, and the Chinese communists introduced and accumulated Marxism, which played a huge role in the anti-imperialist and democratic revolutions.

Whether it is the world's cultural accumulation or China's cultural accumulation, it is actually a great accumulation of books. According to statistics, from the Western Han Dynasty to the Xinhai Revolution, a total of 80,000 kinds of books were published. From 206 BC to the end of 1988, the mainland published more than 900,000 books in 2300 years. This long accumulation of history determines that we are a civilized and developed nation. However, the United States, which has only been founded for more than 200 years, has accumulated its cultural accumulation at an astonishing speed, and the Library of Congress has more than 88.3 million kinds of documents and 877 kilometers of shelves. Naturally, this has also formed part of the development of American civilization. Looking around the world, we will find that the strength and decline, development and backwardness of some countries are of course related to the economic strength, military strength, and political strategy they possess, but they must also pay attention to the classics and documents they possess, the materials and information they hold, the spiritual wealth they have accumulated, and their attitudes and strategies towards these classics, as well as their accumulation methods, speed, and orientation. This will also affect a country's national strength and national fortune.

A book that changes the world

A book can change the fate of a person, the fate of a country, the fate of a world, and even rewrite the history of mankind. We can also take a specific book to test this proposition. Americans have written a book, "16 Books That Influenced World History", including: Marx's "Capital", Newton's "Natural Philosophy and Mathematical Principles", and Hitler's "Mein Kampf".

Marx's Communist Manifesto and Capital changed the world, and everyone acknowledges it. According to statistics, the Communist Manifesto has published more than 1,000 versions in more than 70 languages, and it was transmitted to China in 1920, when Mr. Chen Wangdao translated the first Chinese. Since then, it has begun to change The fate of China.

When Bai Chongxi gave Chiang Kai-shek this pamphlet on hemp paper, Chiang Kai-shek was so overjoyed that he gave it to every officer at and above the rank of all the legionnaires, and the book was soon published in the United States, shocking the world. Facts have proved that the War of Resistance Against Japan was carried out along this line of thought.

Copernicus's Theory of the Movement of The Celestial Bodies. This book has changed the world, it should be said that it has changed the universe. It became a milestone, it was published in 1543, the beginning of the Renaissance, the beginning of modern science from this year. The world has entered a new era.

Einstein's theory of relativity. The beginning of modern physics is set by historians as 1905, because the "Physics Chronicle" published several important papers by Einstein. Einstein proposed the mass-energy interaction formula E=mc2, and the explosion of the first atomic bomb in 1945 confirmed that Einstein was 40 years ahead.

In 1952, Li Siguang completed the book "Chinese Geology", which demonstrated the law of crustal movement and mineral distribution, and proposed a new concept of geomechanics of "tectonic system". At that time, only 2,000 copies were distributed, but under the theoretical guidance of this book, geological team members discovered oil fields such as Daqing, Shengli, and Dagang ten years later, which made China shake off the hat of an oil-poor country.

In 1852, Mrs. Tuo wrote a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which led to the outbreak of the American Civil War, and Lincoln said that a little woman triggered a revolution to free black slaves.

Advanced culture should have four characteristics

Through the accumulation of history layer by layer, an advanced culture has been continuously formed. Those books that have influenced the progress of world civilization have also become the carriers of advanced culture. Now we can add a few words about what is advanced culture. The so-called advanced culture should have four characteristics: accumulation, criticism, creativity, and popularization.

Advanced culture must have sufficient accumulation. The easiest way for us to test whether a culture is advanced or not is to see whether it embraces, absorbs, and summarizes the culture that preceded it, and if it is still a repetition of a certain previous culture, or even does not reach the previous height, it certainly cannot be regarded as advanced.

Advanced culture is distinctly critical. This critique is sometimes a radical revolution, and more often it takes the form of varying degrees of innovation, suggestions, and improvements. In short, it must propose differences from the old culture in order to have its own growth point.

Advanced culture must have new creations of its own personality. All the advanced cultures in history that represent the trend of progress and have played a huge role in promoting the progress of the times have their own personality creation. As soon as it appears, it represents a new height and a new standard in a certain field and aspect, and has made breakthroughs for predecessors and is recognized and followed by future generations.

Advanced culture must be widely pervasive. This culture can gradually be accepted by the public, and thus improve the cultural level in this field, and even improve the level of civilization in the whole society, and finally it will be recorded in the annals of history and become a wealth accepted and recognized by all mankind.

Using these four criteria to measure, we can find that the books mentioned above that have promoted historical progress were or are still advanced cultures, and are still promoting the emancipation of productive forces and the emancipation of people's minds. This also inspires us to grasp the entry points of accumulation, criticism, innovation and popularization when reading, writing and publishing books, so that we can have creativity, personality and progress.

(Source: Beijing Youth Daily)