01
When I first read All the Sand in the World, I felt like I was reading a prose miscellaneous, talking about everything, and stopping at everything, as if I hadn't talked about anything. But if you read deeper, you will find that the text is scattered and distracted.
In this book, the author Jia Xingjia not only talks about the ideas of Zhuangzi and Laozi, but also talks about the spirit of the squire and the culture of the nomads, and also mentions Greek mythology, monsters and ghosts, ancient and modern Chinese and foreign masters, etc., on the basis of breaking through the inherent framework, interpreting the meaning of "culture" from different angles.
He breaks up things in various fields such as history, literature, architecture, religion, philosophy, etc., and systematically expresses them in scattered language and knowledge, and finally completes them under the logical system to achieve perfect self-consistency.
It can be seen that the author's reading scope is broad and his cultural heritage is profound.
02
Jia Xingjia said that "All the Sand in the World" is somewhat like something that a person talks to himself, and the author's "broken thoughts" to the reader are just like Shen Kuo said in "Mengxi Pen Talk", "The person who talks to him is only a pen and inkstone."
The book is divided into nine parts, that is, "nine dialogues", which are what is the night of tonight, nostalgia without a homeland, all old rivers and lakes, life and death are not free, stars and faces, poor reason in the mind, style and character, defection to artists, foreign land and other places.
These dialogues include social thoughts, historical ups and downs, character interpretation, as well as wild history gossip and anecdotes, and readers can appreciate all kinds of scenes of literature, art, and life through this book.
The content in the book is all a little bit of his own life:
"It's fragmented, without any fixed opinions, but I just want to break them up and make them like sand." We live in a world where there are so many conclusions and so many ready-made answers that I want to try to face the world again in the dumbest way, the most likely and solid way. ”
03
Regarding the title of the book "All the Sand in the World", Jia Xingjia admits that he was inspired by the prose of Dillard, a master of American Chinese:
A grain of sand rolls along the riverbed—first running, then stopping, then continuing to run, and so on for millions of years—its edges are gradually smoothed out, and then one day in the future, it will be blown into the desert. No matter where it falls, the sand will only accumulate in a few specific places.
The world is always in full swing. The present we are in is the corner of the past and the future, consisting of choices.
Those things that are repeated over and over again, like grains of sand, are constantly polished and slowly condensed into culture, literature and art, as old as grains of sand, as fresh as dewdrops, and as hard as diamonds.
04
Jia Xingjia, a columnist of the "get" APP, has previously had columns such as "Cultural Reference", "Jia Xingjia Says "Liaozhai", and "Jia Xingjia Says Articles Through the Ages". This "All the Sand in the World" is the text condensation of "cultural reference", and it is also Jia Xingjia's work after five years after "Dust" and "Scribble".
Jia Xingjia is a proper "slash youth", not only contributed to NetEase's Weibo column "They", but also worked as a rock musician and single-player gamer, with the titles of "Harbin Jesus", "Zen punk", "crosstalk world Ito Junji sitting on a bench".
He once had a pen name "Alephe", taken from Borges's short story "Aleph":
Aleph is about two or three centimeters in diameter, but the universe is all encompassed, and the volume is not scaled down.
It is "a point that contains all space".
Jia Xingjia, who incarnates "Alephe", uses words to outline the points and lines of the world, and constantly explores in endless thinking, allowing us to glimpse the world and all sentient beings.
Later, he changed to the pseudonym "Jia Xingjia".
05
There are too many books in this world, especially in the modern era of rapid development of information, how to choose a book, how to read, Jia Xingjia also has his own opinion.
In the now era of developed information, in the face of how to read the "sea of books", he gave a convenient method of his own, "The pace is fast now, when reading, if you can't feel good when you read the first paragraph, and then turn the last three pages, you still don't feel good, you don't read this book, if you can have a throbbing, then this book must be related to you." ”
Encountering a favorite book is like meeting a favorite person, and there is a fate in the dark.