#头条创作挑战赛 #
Lao Zhe
I have never been to my home in the eastern suburbs once, but I read his book "Home in the Suburbs". In the past few books, he has written about his travels, the four seasons in Germany, cycling along the Rhine, and the parks in Shanghai, all of which he has seen while walking outside, and finally wrote about his settlement and its environment, which is also expected. The suburbs are relative to the city, belong to the periphery of the city, usually not far away, not really the countryside, so it also has some of the convenience of the city, but also has the countryside of the vast land and fresh air. Anyone who has lived in the city for a long time can easily understand and imagine the appeal of settling in the suburbs. Distance from the place of work, traffic conditions, living conveniences, children's admission to kindergartens, distance from hospitals, and housing prices constitute many considerations. Looking out through the floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of the mountains not far away is certainly an easy advantage to understand, after all, settling home is a certain balance and synthesis of multiple needs.
I remember when I lived in Berlin in 2019, I lived in the suburbs near White Lake for more than half a year, and the terminal of bus 255 could not be considered a suburb, and it was already an endless field within a ten-minute walk. In spring, large golden rape flowers bloom, and under the rosy sunlight characteristic of high latitudes, there is a very unreal illusion. Almost every day I leave the station and walk to the wilderness in the countryside.
During this period, you will pass through the garden in front of and behind the neatly arranged bungalows and bungalows, the fences are usually half a person high, and the plants, facilities, and even the layout of the rooms in the courtyard can be seen. After many observations, I found that this place is almost uninhabited, especially on weekends and holidays, even a personal figure cannot be seen, and then further observation, I found that most of the houses here are relatively small, and the living facilities are incomplete, which puzzled me, my daughter told me that this is a "fairy tale cottage" of Berlin city people, rented from the government, built according to their favorite appearance, used for weekend vacations, usually they do not live here. Sure enough, on weekends, I saw cars parked in front of and behind the house. I love wandering through these uninhabited fairytale huts during non-weekend hours when the flowers are in full bloom and admiring their elaborate gardening works, and I love walking by the city's gaze on weekends, sharing the joy on their faces, and saying hello in my only German "hello" when they look at each other. Many Berliners have their own "suburban home".
In the spring of 1989, I accompanied my 70-year-old grandmother back to my hometown for the last time, and after settling her in the ancestral residence of Changgou, I went to Zhengzhou to take the re-examination after the postgraduate examination. At that time, not long after acquaintance with the East, it was inseparable, and it was already an invincible friend. When summer came, I invited Dongfang to join me in my hometown.
Changgou is bordered by the Purple Mountain in the north and the Qin River in the south, which is a small mountain village where I grew up in childhood. Purple Mountain is only ten miles from our village, and its main peak, known locally as Little North Peak, has been looking at it every day for ten years and has never climbed it. I asked Dongfang to climb the mountain with him, I needed to find a suitable pair of shoes for him, Dongfang was long and big, 45 yards, I remember asking all the people in the village, and I couldn't borrow shoes of this size. For the first time, I was surprised to find that the inhabitants of this village, in addition to having the same accent and similar expression, even the size of the soles of their feet were almost uniform. I, a Changgou person who was born thousands of miles away, suddenly had more solid evidence on the topic of belonging to Changgou. In the ten years of living in the long ditch, my feet did grow day by day, but it ended up at size 40, the standard size of the long ditch, which made it almost impossible for me to buy my own shoes in the Berlin shoe store.
In the spring of 2021, I went to southern Anhui and took a taxi from Huizhou Ancient Street to Dai Zhen's tomb. When approaching the destination, the driver's navigation loses direction. In the fields on both sides of the road, you can see the mounds, but you can't see where the cemetery is, and it took a lot of trouble to find out the exact location. After leaving the road, it was a dirt road in the field, just after rain, the ground was full of stagnant water, overgrown with weeds, every step down, all kinds of insects scattered, flying and jumping, this scene suddenly reminded me of my childhood years in Changgou. There are so many small lives gathered in such a small space, and the four words full of life are not enough to express their situation. After ten years of crawling in the fields, I have never encountered such a scene since I left Changditch.
Reading the Oriental text "home in the suburbs" often reminds me of my childhood years in Changgou. It was a very small village on the Qin River, more than 20 miles away from the county seat, and I had never been to the county seat in ten years. It was still during the Cultural Revolution, and the production teams under the people's commune system were the way the villagers worked and dominated their entire lives. The house we lived in was still a four-beam, eight-pillar hall house built by my grandfather's grandfather during the Daoguang period of the Qing Dynasty, with three wooden buildings, typical northern houses, and my grandfather's grandfather and my grandfather's father died in this house. If it weren't for the famine that swept through the Central Plains in 1942, my grandfather would probably have died in this small village called Changgou. The fate of the harvesters has been sowing grain on the land handed down from generation to generation for thousands of years, paying tribute, and multiplying heirs.
In 1942, when my father was five years old, he fled Changgou with his parents and never returned to settle here. When the Cultural Revolution broke out, my home was suddenly closed by big-character newspapers, and my grandmother paraded the streets to escape criticism, carrying a one-and-a-half-year-old me on a train and returning to our ancestral home. Since I was born, I have had a silver long-lived lock, which my grandmother's father personally built, and in my first single photograph, I had that silver lock around my neck. According to my grandmother's custom, every birthday, the silver lock rope sleeve was wrapped in a layer of red cloth, thicker and thicker, and by the time of my twelfth birthday, the red cloth rope sleeve I remembered was as thick as an adult's thumb. On his twelfth birthday, after wrapping the twelfth layer of red cloth in Changgou, he invited an elderly man from the village to preside over a short ceremony, and then cut the rope sleeve from the silver lock and threw it on the roof. I left Changgou shortly after unlocking the lock, when I was in the fifth grade of elementary school.
When I was one and a half years old, I was carried by my grandmother by train and traveled thousands of miles, naturally I have no memories, and after a little older, due to continuous train travel, I traveled between urban and rural areas almost every year, from Changgou in the mountain village of the Central Plains to the heavy industrial city of Taiyuan, and the travel experience became richer with age. Traveling between very different worlds is a life experience that I have been very accustomed to since I was a child, and I think it is very important. If a person begins to face an unfamiliar environment different from the known world after becoming an adult, it may be difficult to adapt quickly.
The French philosopher Deleuze likes to use the concepts of "territorialization" and "deterritorialization", which refers to the process by which society suppresses desire by domesticating and limiting the productive energy of desire and incorporating it into an established normative system. "Re-territorialization" refers to the reinvention after subverting the traditional territorial structure. Capitalism subverts all traditional symbols, values, and structures that bind production, exchange, and desire, while at the same time "recoding" everything with abstract equivalence logic, integrating them into the state, family, law, commodity logic, psychoanalysis, and other normative systems, a process known as re-territorialization. In his view, deterritorialization is an escape route, through which the subject can not only escape by itself, but also completely disconnect from the past and achieve individual liberation. Deterritorialization is the movement of production change, which shows the creative potential of the subject. Through escape, aggregates leave the old environment and enter new territory, discovering their potential by creating new environments.
The Green Train in the 1970s was a very familiar means of transportation in my childhood, and although tickets were cheap in those days, my parents' income was so low at that time, I remember that the annual travel fee paid to the railway was a huge expense for the family, and I could always hear it in the tone of adults talking about this money, but the rule of free tickets for children saved me from any possible psychological pressure. Not only did I get a lot of fun from the train, but I also unexpectedly accumulated life experience of deterritorialization, although I didn't understand its value until many years later.
"Deterritorialization is a blade, a courageous, constantly pioneering and never-ending process, which can be physical or material, psychological or spiritual." Deleuze created his philosophy of difference in response to our ever-converging world, using difference and generation as antidotes, and deterritorialization as a prescription to cure the ills of the times, hoping to restore the complex, diverse and creative nature of the world. He believes that the fish leaving the sea and fleeing inland in the early stage of evolution is an epoch-making historical deterritorialization, although the deterritorian at this time is not a warrior, but a deserter, but this escape is both conquest and creation.
Of course, the East's escape from the city and overcoming various difficulties to escape to the suburbs has its own personality factors, but in my opinion, the pursuit of deterritorialized life is the "spiritual clue" that is implemented throughout.
In the summer of 2007, I suddenly received a call from Changgou, saying that my ancestral home was leaking badly, and the old house was most afraid of being vacant, and it had been uninhabited since the eighties, and that once the rain eroded, it would soon collapse. I hurried back and commissioned a childhood friend to renovate it, and fifteen years passed before I could take a second look. Over the years, I have secretly made a wish in my heart to simply decorate the house of that ancestral home and go to live for a period of time every year, even if it is only for a few days, but I have not taken action so far. After reading this manuscript of the East, I was excited to try it again, words will always affect our lives in some way, a certain decision in our lives. If one day I really live in Changgou, I think it must have the demagogic effect of Eastern writing.
Who can be indifferent to such a depiction?
The earth and mountains are alive, not the eternal lines and colors on the picture, their breath between wind, frost, rain and snow flows in a variety of weather, and there is an endless wonder that you can't see enough
When the north and south windows are open, there is often a wind that cannot be experienced on the ground, and on the roof platform, it is always bathed in the distant wind, and in the morning and evening you can often breathe the smell of thorns on the distant mountains.
Isn't nature everywhere? Where there is no change of day and night, where there is no change of seasons, wind, frost, rain and snow, isn't it everywhere?
Urbanization is the most remarkable social movement of this era, which is changing the face of the land every day, more and more people choose to live in cities of different sizes and classes, some artificial rhythm replaces the rhythm of nature, we seem to put on a reinforced concrete coat, through underground railroads and tunnels. The illumination of the light and the regulation of the indoor temperature allow us to obtain pure time without the disturbance of the weather.
In theory, our work should be most efficient during such a time. The comfort of life, which increases with the degree of technological intervention, seems to have been tamed by humans, except for a few extreme disasters such as volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis. Cities exist for work and efficiency, human survival in cities has to be utilitarian and practical, our sensitivity to nature is declining, because the urban lifestyle makes us unable to observe nature well. We are becoming more and more accustomed to looking at nature very practically, with a pleasant spring and autumn climate, increasing outdoor activities, and hiding indoors where the temperature can be adjusted when the cold and heat arrive. This is how we communicate with nature.
The most moving part of the Eastern text is his observation and feeling of nature.
As long as they travel under the forest early in the morning and see the speckled light, they will be deeply struck by the happiness that life originally gives people health, enough to last a whole day. They can return to the kind of unremitting slackness that will shine as long as they are awake, and find a life as if they were focused on devoting themselves to some great cause; In the long run, reliving such a life with clear boundaries between sleep and waking will achieve inner balance regardless of age and status, and open up a natural way of positive cycle in life.
Living in a home in the suburbs, the alternation of day and night every day, the change of seasons in the year, cloudy fog, wind, frost, rain and snow, the change of sky and room light at every moment, and the body's tolerance of temperature and heat are very important contents in this work. These life experiences are very familiar to everyone, but at the same time familiar and unconcerned. The most brilliantly written texts in this book are the chapters that describe the rain. The author's heartfelt love of rain and rainy weather can easily infect us, and although the endless rainy season may not be pleasant for everyone, reading these words about rainy days is undoubtedly refreshing for us.
The sound of the rain is even, it can be said that it has been like this, there is no change in strength, no umlaut, no chords; There is only repetition, only changes that are like repetition but clearly hidden in the repetition that your ears cannot hear and cannot hear enough.
I quickly read what should belong to me best, reading and writing as the main content of life. He did not follow this thread to comment deeply or analyze those readings, but stopped at the action of reading and writing.
Because I am reluctant to use electric lights, try to follow the natural rest of daylight, so every minute and second of daylight is precious and must be fully utilized. Those things that can be done without light are kept until after sunset as much as possible; Those readings and writes that require light are done as much as possible while the sky is still light. I don't want to sit in front of the computer and write when there is still daylight, but I still want to use skylight to read as much as possible. For the cold coming, they try to resist it and refuse to retreat. Because the mind is still immersed in the distant immersion caused by Pessoa.
He also writes about his past, his own growth, but these are often brushed off because they are not the focus of this book.
In such a state of good study, every day rejoices, and every day clings to the excitement of life itself. Isn't that the beautiful imagination of growing up when we were young! Compared with the real elementary school student state, now I can clearly realize that this is the ultimate state of life.
I don't have the restraint of the East, and I often can't help myself when I talk about myself. I don't always have enough time to read because there is so much to read, every day for decades. I know that this contradiction cannot be solved, the ancients have an end, and I know no end, sighing in vain. I don't know when the idea of exhausting all knowledge and reading good books all over the world sneaked into my mind, which sounds crazy, and it seems that otherwise it is not enough to comfort life.
Oriental's description of his suburban study reminds me of my first study. Demolished ten years ago due to the widening of the road, it is now a grove by the side of the road, which is still where I was born, so I would like to take this opportunity to write a few more words. It was a self-built bungalow in my own courtyard, with the door facing north, the window facing west to the yard, a two-meter-high bookcase, and it was built for me by my late father. The upper half is a sliding glass door, the lower half is a wooden sliding door, and my collection has long been filled. I had just graduated from college and was experiencing a great discomfort, and on my desk was a Beethoven copper-plated plaster bust, a spiritual icon of my youth. In addition to reading, I use a two-card tape recorder to listen to cassette tapes, Bei San "Hero", Bei V "Destiny", Bei Liu "Pastoral", Chopin's Piano Nocturne, Lao Chai Yigang, Sixth "Pathos", Dvořák's "New World".
Although I had my own room, I couldn't bear to live in the same yard with my parents and family, and I felt disturbed by them even when I closed the door. During that year, I ran a literary salon with my friends, drank, had ups and downs, and stayed up all night, which affected my normal work, and I had to be with my friends to resist the loneliness of this world. Looking back now, I still remember the restlessness at that time, I don't know how to be good, and going out is a release of some kind of life instinct. In any case, I must live as myself, take responsibility for my actions, and go to the world, and before I set out, I used a brick kiln abandoned by others as my own youth fortress. At a time when I was fragile, sensitive, unconfident and impulsive, and at a time when I was hungry for the future and helpless, an isolated experience of solitude seemed necessary.
The vastness of the landscape is a call for people to travel long distances. After swimming such long distances with its wings, the cuckoo continues to depict the vastness of its swim with its songs. Like humans, it believes that only the life depicted has meaning.
While I was out for a walk, I found an abandoned brick kiln, and for some unknown reason, it was discontinued and the people who built it abandoned it. I wanted to live there. My father went to greet the village officials at my request and got their permission. I myself pulled a wire from a nearby resident's house, moved a simple camp bed, and started my isolated life with a table and a chair.
When winter came, I borrowed the honeycomb coal stoves they had eliminated from my classmates, installed my own cigarette pipes, and stayed there in the bitter cold. I was in my early twenties, full of rebellious thoughts, looking down on everything mediocre in everyday life, and looking back now, after more than half a year of isolation, my father must have seen that the symbolism was greater than the practical meaning, but he did not stop me or persuade me not to do so.
Whenever I practice dumbbells on my doorway platform, I always see groups of miners passing by my door, they are covered in black, hard hats are black, their faces are black, only the whites of their eyes show when they turn, and the whites of their teeth when they speak or laugh, which looks particularly eye-catching. The northwest wind howled all night, my doors and windows were not tight, the wind was leaking, the room was cold, I lay on the camp bed covered with a strict quilt and put my military coat over the quilt, barely keeping the temperature, in my diary, I called it my own Castle, in fact it was my adolescent battle fortress. With a heart that is not willing to be mediocre, I vowed to leave this place where I could not see my value. It was the age of poetry, and I can only remember the titles of the poems I wrote at that time, one of which was called "I Walk, Against the Winter Wind."
In this prose work of the East, more than a dozen of his short poems are actually included, placed at the beginning of several texts, facing nature, facing the heart, it seems that only poetry can directly state things, eliminating all embellishment and explanations, eliminating context, and only saying the most important words. One of my favorite oriental poems goes like this:
This day
The wheat is slightly yellow
Row the tart away
There is a sweet fragrance
Have strange dreams
We
Let's go on this ordinary road in the countryside
Set off just after dawn in the morning
There is no direction
There is no purpose
I don't want to come back when
The land of May is boundless
Can go on forever
No sun and no tiredness
We were in high spirits
There is no unpleasantness
There is no sluggishness
It seems like
Everything before and after this life
It's all just today's foreshadowing, and aftertaste
I know that Dongfang has always written poetry, and with his love of nature, sooner or later he will come to the road of writing poetry.
When I read this passage from him, I felt a warmth in my heart.
The wife rode along, the brisk rotation of the wheels and the rhythmic pedaling of the footsteps soon found a suitable concerto for each other. The light rain became warm in the sweat, and the soaked village and yellow apricot in front of me were also warm.
When I met Dongfang on a college campus thirty-five years ago, he was in love, and his girlfriend was sitting on the front beam of his bicycle, his car was walking through the crowd, his yellow hair and beard were already conspicuous, and he was happily shouting "Make way!" as he walked. Please give way! ", how swaggering it used to be. Thirty-five years later, the girl herself, following the running man, on a dirt road in the deserted countryside, with a light rain in the sky and a basket with the "warm" yellow apricot they had just bought, is a touching story that spans more than three decades.
Dongfang is a man who goes to bed early and gets up early, so his observations of dawn and sunrise are very moving.
The dark western mountains of the morning echo between the light gray clouds with traces of the night above the morning sunset, and in the middle is full, everything is about to wake up, the freshness that has not yet woken up, the freshness that has arrived and the joy that is coming.
For decades, I have maintained my bad habit of going to bed late and waking up late, so I miss almost every "wonderful morning scene" in my life, and in order to find a reason for myself to continue to do so, I have to mention Mr. Lu Xun's great name and his lonely writing in the dead of night.
The Russian writer Chekhov, a master I share with the East, once said, "Looking at the warm night sky, at the rivers and ponds that reflect the tired and melancholy sunset, is a great satisfaction for which you can give your whole soul." ”
Anyone who can recognize Chekhov's natural attitude of "looking and being contented" will surely find words that will delight you in Mr. Liang Dongfang's new book "Home in the Outskirts".