Master Mo Yan said about eating coal, and the teachers and students ate it with relish. I really can't figure out if it really happened or if it was the author's artistic exaggeration. But in terms of common sense, this is a more extreme phenomenon. Even when hungry and hungry, eating coal seems to be more uncomfortable than eating soil. Because coal is hard, like stone, it will make you stumble when you eat it.
Coal is fuel, not food, and cannot be eaten and cannot provide nutrients to the human body. When I was a child, my family relied on coal for cooking and heating. I often bought coal, pulled a big cart at a time, and piled it next to the house. I was fine, so I climbed to the top of the coal pile and looked into the distance. I saw the hard stuff beneath my feet, black and shiny, like a stone. It is only known that it was dug out of the ground, and as for how it was formed, it is confusing and curious.
When I went to elementary school, I learned from my nature class that coal was formed by ancient plants that were buried in the ground and formed over a long geological period. Because of the large-scale mining and application of coal, the industrial revolution was born, and there were advanced machines and tools such as steam engines, trains, ships, steelmaking blast furnaces, etc., which changed the world.
Guo Moruo writes about coal in the furnace, expressing the feelings of the wanderer who is in a foreign country and misses the motherland. Among them is the sentence: "I burned this for my beloved." "Two pictures: black coal, burning red in the furnace, revealing fiery feelings. The black coal was eaten by a group of teachers and students with great interest and swallowed in their mouths.
By excavating the meaning of coal, both writers clearly express their different tendencies and attitudes towards reality.
