Author | Zheng Dingding
Source | Franklin Reading Club (ID: Franklin ReadingClub)
Anchor | Fan Deng Reading · Chu Qiao
Interpret the trailer
Meet · Meet your unknown self in the book.
Good evening to all book lovers, welcome to the reading column "Encounter" produced by Fan Deng Reading.
Today I would like to share with you the famous novelist Maupassant's long debut work "A Lifetime".
The book begins with the hopeful green years of a young girl and ends with a swaddled newborn.
After you have experienced a tragic life, you can still see the heart of the child and rekindle your love for life.
Maupassant is a world-class short story master, but he is also quite accomplished in long fiction.
His long debut novel", "A Lifetime", was very popular as soon as it came out, and it is one of the 37 world famous books recommended by Mao Dun for must-read.
Tolstoy said:
Maupassant is genius because he writes not as he wishes, but as things are, and thus better guides people to the truth.
This is especially evident in "A Lifetime".
"A Lifetime" tells the story of the innocent girl Yana who pursues happiness with all her heart, but suffers from the betrayal of her husband, the death of her parents, and the tragic life of leaving home alone.
Yana's experience is certainly sympathetic, but the reasons behind the tragedy are even more thought-provoking.
Psychologist Murphy said: "Everyone is a prophet of his own destiny." ”
After reading Maupassant's "Life", I found that everyone's ending was hidden in their own cognition.
Low-level cognition, the initiator of sad life
Yana was born with a golden spoon, and she sits on 31 farms, does not have to work hard to drill camps, and guarantees 20,000 francs a year.
Life without a trace of gloom has created her innocent personality and made her cognition of things very simple.
She fell in love with the "Phoenix Man" Yu Lian at first sight, because the other party was dignified, funny and talkative, and his eyes were like autumn water.
In just 3 months, the two went through the whole process of knowing each other, falling in love and getting married.
Yana thought that this was a destined love, but she did not know that everything was just a trap for Jullien.
As soon as the honeymoon ended, Jullien's true face was exposed, and he not only occupied his wife's family property, was harsh on everyone, but also cheated one after another.
At first, when I looked at it, I thought that Yana was too unlucky, because of the wrong belief in one person to ruin a life, maybe another person fell in love, the result will be completely different.
However, after careful consideration, it was found that the hypothesis did not hold, and her bitter fruit was closely related to her own cognition.
After studying in the monastery for 6 years, she longed for the outside world, she thought that everywhere outside the monastery was bright, and she did not know that there were dangers under the world of flowers and flowers.
Her father told her to sell a farmstead to renovate her home.
She only cares about whether the repairs are beautiful or not, but she can't see the poor management of the family business.
During a grand ceremony, Yu Lian suddenly said to her:
"If you want, make this our engagement ceremony."
She was immersed in the joy of being proposed, and did not realize the frivolity and perfunctory behind it.
She is accustomed to thinking of the good in everything, not knowing that under the sun, there will be shadows, and there is nothing wrong with simple optimism, but often cannot guide life correctly.
If you do not understand the dangers of the world, if you do not know the people's hearts, it is inevitable that you will suffer losses.
Schopenhauer said: "The largest prison in the world is the consciousness of the human mind. ”
Acting rashly without insight is doomed to pay for recklessness.
Insufficient judgment will inevitably lead to decision-making errors, low-level cognition, and is the initiator of a sad life.
The lower the level of cognition, the easier it is to be manipulated
On a snowy night, Yana was so cold that she couldn't sleep.
At this time, she desperately longed for Yu Lian's comfort, and went to her husband's bedroom, but saw a scene that made her ashamed:
In the dim light of the fire, her husband and another woman, pillowed side by side on the same pillow.
The two snuggled up to each other and slept soundly.
The woman was none other than her brother-in-law, Rosalie.
The impact of the joint betrayal of the two closest relatives made her heart ache.
She ran to the edge of the cliff, intending a hundred.
At the moment of a thousand guns, Yana suddenly remembered her parents, so she gave up taking her life.
After this, she is determined to draw a line with Yu Lian, but the doctor's diagnosis hit her in the head because she is pregnant.
The priest said:
Children are god-compensated happiness, a new bond between husband and wife, and a guarantee of future fidelity for husbands.
She listened to the priest and saw the child as a new place of happiness.
Since then, she has been circling around the child and trying to meet all the needs of the child, but when her son grows up, he is infected with many vices and even runs away from home with prostitutes.
In addition to writing letters asking for money, the other time the son ignored her.
But she thinks her son wrote to himself, which proves that she has not been abandoned.
Giving money to help clean up the mess is nothing compared to keeping in touch with his son.
It was Yana's connivance that made her son emptied her family property.
Romain Rolland said: "The most terrible enemy of life is not a clear goal and sufficient cognition. ”
Yana had the opportunity to stop the loss in time, but she was repeatedly manipulated by people because of her credulity.
Whether it was the priest's hypocritical exhortations or her son's false admiration, she accepted them all.
Even in middle age, she remains as almost blindly optimistic as she did when she was young.
All thoughts are causes, and all that is received in the present moment is the effect.
If a person's cognition stays in place forever and does not rise to a higher place, then no matter how time passes, the tragedy will only continue to repeat itself.
Only by breaking the inherent cognition can we open up new situations
Yana's father died suddenly in the middle of processing the remittance, and Aunt Lison subsequently died of an aggravated illness.
After sending away the only two elders left around, Yana, who was alone, was full of thoughts and couldn't help but feel life and death again.
Fortunately, the reappearance of the handmaiden Rosalie brought her a turnaround.
Rosalie wanted to take the opportunity to repay the favor and make up for her mistakes, so she offered herself no money to take the position of handmaiden, and in just two weeks, Yana cleared the mess with Rosalie's help and repaid all the debts.
But after paying off the debt, the money left was only enough to make ends meet.
At first, she didn't care about it, and she still felt that she could get by.
Rosa pricked her luck: "If you don't make a positive change, you will soon have nothing." ”
Yana knew that this was true, so she agreed to sell the big farmstead for a small mansion in order to get an extra deposit every year.
She also plucked up the courage to write to her son, solemnly declaring that she would not give any more money in the future.
She even traveled to Paris alone to visit her son for the first time, determined to find out the truth about the other party.
Although she was unable to find the other party in the end, she at least stopped drawing the ground as a prison, but what was unexpected was that her son took the initiative to return home soon after.
Without Yana's financial support, he really couldn't hang out outside and could only return to his old mother.
This peak turned around, so that Yana had a new understanding of life, and she no longer complained about the unfairness of fate.
Writer Zhang Shuxi said:
"Our cognition is an invisible ruler that measures the results of your judgment of the outside world."
If people think that blessings and misfortunes are predestined and throw everything to fate, then it is easy to compromise in case of trouble.
Once you change your thinking and understand how to grasp fate, which is more important than how fate is, you will know how to fight.
Write at the end
Throughout Yana's life, she was both unfortunate and lucky.
When she was young, she was sent to a monastery by her parents, isolated from the world and raised too naïve.
When she was young, she did not fully enjoy the prosperity, and she encountered people who were unladylike and fell into calculations with ulterior motives.
When she was middle-aged, she was toyed with by her son, and she was tired of aging before she died, and her family was ruined.
But fortunately, Yana meets Rosalie again, gets out of the situation with the help of the other party, and changes her cognition.
As Maupassant writes in the novel:
"In this life, people are neither as good as they think, nor as bad as they think."
Life cannot be smooth sailing, and everyone will have their own favorable adversity.
The difference is whether it was a thrilling or a hard time.
Cognitive height determines the degree of happiness, how to improve cognition is a compulsory course in everyone's life.
When things happen, you can't just look at the appearance and spend more time exploring the essence of things.
Don't be reckless in making decisions, and speculate more about the results behind your choices.
Maintain a high degree of sensitivity, practice the heart through experience, and cultivate the mind through the situation, and life will get better and better.
Click "Watching" and encourage each other together.
Author | Zheng Dingding
Source | Franklin Reading Club (ID: Franklin ReadingClub)
Column Director | Come slowly
Typography | Zheng to the north
Image | The pictures in this article come from the Internet, and are invaded and deleted
音乐 | Marie Alatalo - Nocturne in Bb minor, Op. 9, No. 1