The Spring Festival holiday is also a good time to read.
Traditional festivals, the flavor of the New Year is strong, we can reunite with our families, visit relatives and friends, go out to play, taste food at the same time, we can also read into the big book of "Spring Festival". During the holidays, we might as well slow down, experience life in reading, know how to appreciate, understand the world, and know ourselves.
The plan of the year lies in the spring. Spring is the day of reading. Let's pick up the book and read it together during this Spring Festival holiday!
-- The editor
Read the book "Spring Festival" well
Wang Gan
The Spring Festival is a big book that you never get tired of reading.
The cover of the book is undoubtedly red. The first page must be the Spring Festival couplets, and the second page may be firecrackers, the Spring Festival Gala, the New Year's money, or dumplings for some people. Everyone's memories are arranged and combined into a colorful picture scroll of the Spring Festival.
Recently, I read a collection of essays about the memory and memories of the Spring Festival, "Impression of the Spring Festival: Literary Masters Talk about Traditional Chinese Festivals" published by Guizhou People's Publishing House and edited by Li Hao. The book contains 28 works by 26 authors. Among the authors, there are influential writers of the older generation, young and middle-aged talents who are on the rise, and many of them are winners of the Mao Dun Literature Award and the Lu Xun Literature Award, showing that different writers (especially writers of different eras) have very different understandings of the Spring Festival, life and literature.
Speaking of which, the writer's writing about the Spring Festival has also influenced my life choices. Before I came to Beijing to work, I was worried that my hometown of Jiangsu would be quite different from the north and south of Beijing, especially in terms of customs and habits. However, after reading Mr. Lao She's "Spring Festival in Beijing", my doubts were dispelled, and since then I have strengthened my confidence in "going north", because I have seen almost the same Spring Festival folk customs in the two places. Mr. Lao She wrote about the New Year in Beijing since he was a child, "After the twenty-third, everyone will be busier, and the New Year will arrive in the blink of an eye." Before the Chinese New Year's Eve, every family must paste the Spring Festival couplets and clean them once, which is called cleaning the house...... According to the old custom, most of the shops are closed for five days, and they do not open until the sixth day of the first month. If you don't prepare for the next few days, it's not easy to replenish temporarily. "I thought there was a big difference between the cultures of the North and the South, but after reading this text, I felt very close to it, and I also have the same customs in my hometown.
In the book "Impression of the Spring Festival", the writers recall their past Spring Festival from different regions, different generations, different genders, and different perspectives, some are warm, some are witty, and some are vicissitudes, which can be described as the same Spring Festival and different lives. In Xu Zechen's "The Spring Festival Lacking the Taste of the Year is Just a Small Long Holiday", the memory of the Chinese New Year's Eve is unforgettable: "In many places, the Chinese New Year's Eve dinner is at night, and the family talks around the fireplace at night and has a hearty meal, and we eat it at noon. My grandmother, my mom, and my sister were in the kitchen, and my grandfather, my dad, and I were in the yard, circling around a table of eight immortals, writing couplets to our neighbors. He described the details of the couplet as follows: "In the early years, my grandfather and my father wrote it, and then my father wrote it with me, and then my father and I wrote it, and then my father stood by and watched me go about my work." It was all written, and they took it home and pasted it. "Our rule is that couplets must be posted before meals. After my neighbors left, I used the leftover paper to write my couplet, so our family's lunch was always the latest in the village......"
Sticking Spring Festival couplets is an important traditional folk custom of the Spring Festival. In my hometown, there is also a unique folk custom, we call it "sending the phoenix" - some people who can speak the Tao go from house to house, holding a colorful "phoenix" tied with papier-mâché, beating gongs and drums, singing and speaking, many words are made up, according to different families to make up some auspicious words, the host will give them some small gifts, such as red envelopes, cigarettes, candies and rice cakes. I heard that this custom is still practiced in my hometown. Of course, nowadays, "sending the phoenix" is not to get a little extra money, but a kind of folk customs with a strong New Year's flavor, nostalgia and entertainment. In the 80s, I wrote a short story called "Chinese New Year's Eve" about this folklore.
Now that I read the book "Impression of the Spring Festival", everything written in the book is true, and it is more down-to-earth than my early "Spring Festival writing". Reading such a book during the Spring Festival is in season. As a traditional festival of the Chinese nation, no festival can integrate many cultural elements as richly as the Spring Festival. The Spring Festival contains both cultural elegance and customs, suitable for all ages, and a combination of movement and static. As a cultural bonanza, the Spring Festival can be written repeatedly. I hope that more writers will write about their feelings about the Spring Festival and the taste of the New Year in everyone's hearts. The Spring Festival is a big book, I can't finish it, and I can't read it enough.
Experience it slowly, appreciate it slowly
Lu Mei
Every writer is looking for their own sentences. Every good writer also has their own sentences. Here, a sentence is not just a sentence, it is an expression and expression—the way of speaking, the speaker's expression, tone, character, and thought activities, all of which are conveyed by the writer, constitute the writer's "own sentence".
During this time, I looked at the paintings and calligraphy of Hunan painter Cai Gao, and I wanted to share the parts I saw with people who could finally give themselves a little time during the Spring Festival holiday. During the holidays, put down your phone, look up, breathe in the air, look up at the clouds, look down at the flowers, and see how the "light with feet" creeps in through the window. At the moment, it is better to turn a few more pages of interesting books.
In the past, I had only read some of Cai Gao's picture books, and I felt the simplicity and liveliness of the folk, so I didn't dig deeper. Later, I got a set of Cai Gao's book "Remember Being Young at the Time", which was beautifully packed in a cardboard box. When opened, there are six small books in the palm of your hand, in the form of traditional Chinese folding paper. There are not many words, and the paintings are only a few brushstrokes, a freehand little person, two or three plants, a green leaf, two ants, or walking clouds and moons...... Sketchbooks like manuscripts, each with a theme and style. Although it is a picture book, it is very special, the picture and form are the same, and it is good to pay a little attention to the text. Such a set of "luxury books" really couldn't satisfy my curiosity, so I bought her essay collection "A Dumpling of Rain and a Dumpling of Grass" from the Internet. I enjoyed the process of reading, and I was reluctant to read it all at once.
Let's see how she "makes sentences" for flowers. For example, perilla flowers, "perilla blooming is very serious. At this time, it is lecturing, talking about how a leaf can be bitten out of a small space by a small insect. "For example, onion flowers," the onion flowers are so naughty, onions like to be lively, and the flowers are also popular. She wrote about wisteria flowers, which had just budded in the cold spring season, "That is beautiful, it is indescribable in words, the red and gray that emerges from the transparent gray blue, that beauty, the sky is modest." ”
This description of the scent of the sun is truly eye-catching. The painter's eye is always more sensitive to form and color, but the brush is also vulgar. Cai Gao's depiction is really "coming to God". "Come to God" is her word, and she says in the preface: "I remember the plain, the interesting, and the daily life of the God." Cultivate your own vision from it. She lowered her body so much, the pen and plants, flowers, insects and fish are one dimension, which is equivalent to bowing down, so what she sees is a very subtle dynamic, and people who are in a hurry can't see it at all. When she wrote this, I thought of a person - Wang Zengqi, a writer who also loves to paint. I felt a kind of classical landscape atmosphere and exquisite leisure from the articles of the two. In the same sense, Wang Zengqi also said, he wrote in a "Novel Writings": "To say a thing tastefully, you have to say it slowly, not in a hurry, so that you can understand the physical situation of people, judge the words and fix the atmosphere, so as to refresh the mind and attract people...... Zhang Daiji Liu Jingting said that Wu Song beat the tiger, Wu Song went to the hotel, and there was a bang, and the empty wine jar in the store was buzzing, saying that he was 'coloring in his leisure, and he was so fine'. Writing this, Wang Zengqi changed lines leisurely and said: "Only leisurely can be fine." Then he changed his line and said, "Don't be in a hurry. ”
This is what a good writer "owns in the sentence". It's the same with a painter. In the brushstrokes of non-mediocre painters, not only the colors, but also the fragrance of the sun, the clarity of the rainfall, the plants that climb over the windowsill and the books along the table are like the feet of the spring.
Since we are talking about Wang Zengqi, let's also take a look at how he writes about weather and plants. For example, there is an essay "Summer", which begins with the following paragraph: "Summer mornings are so comfortable. The air was cool, and there was dew on the grass (and on the cobwebs). Write one large character and read one ancient text. Summer mornings are so comfortable. It's as simple as that, but it reads "really comfortable". I feel that there is wind in the words, which makes people feel refreshed. Next, I wrote about summer flowers and melons, as well as insects, and wrote about enjoying the shade in the patio when I was a child, and suddenly came at the end: "The chicken head rice is old, the new walnuts are down, and the summer is almost over." There is also a "Garden", which is writing about how stinky sesame seeds are annoying, and how he was in the garden in his childhood with a net in a hurry to catch the cicada, and suddenly the pen turned: "I think saxifrage has a fishy smell." He changed the line and said: "The red on the leaves of the perilla, the summer vacation is almost over." The article does not end, and the writer does not give an explanation, and the following continues to write about the heavenly cow "on the big weeping willow".
Such a seemingly casual prose is actually a repeated pondering after careful observation of life, Cai Gao said that it was "cut down on the complicated and simplified", and Wang Zengqi said that "the casualness of painstaking management" probably means the same thing. For a child, the passing of summer also means the end of summer vacation. The perilla leaves grow old at this time, and the old perilla leaves are purple and red. Fresh chicken head rice also ages at this time. Such a sentence embodies Wang Zengqi's feelings for timing, and the love can only be meticulous and felt in the depths.
A good text is actually life itself, and how you live, you will grow into an article. So there are many things that we can't rush to do, and we have to go through them slowly and appreciate them slowly. I haven't finished reading Cai Gao's collection of essays yet, so I'll read it slowly. She said, "I also have a feeling of encountering my own words when I look at them." Look slowly, meet slowly, who says it's not.
Return to the time and space of classic classics
Li Yunlei
I am mainly engaged in contemporary literary criticism, and I rarely have a long Spring Festival holiday, so I want to avoid the contemporary and read some ancient books. At first, I read famous works such as "Dream of the Red Chamber", and later expanded to "Historical Records", "Book of Han", "Book of the Later Han", "Zizhi Tongjian" and other historical classics. Sometimes the reading of the Spring Festival has been carried over and has become a reading throughout the year. For example, I have spent two or three years "gnawing" the "General Guide to Governance" twice, and I have benefited a lot.
In addition to the gains in knowledge, reading ancient books can more importantly allow me to return to the time and space of traditional China, see how our ancestors came step by step, see how our civilization was formed, see what has happened in China every year from ancient times to the present, see what important people and events have been in history, and see how certain accidental factors have changed the course of history...... Reading history also made me sensitive to time, so much so that it triggered some thoughts. I once said in an article that while modernizing, Chinese retains its own national identity and even has unique creativity. For example, the "Spring Festival" has always been the most solemn and important festival in China, and it runs parallel to the "New Year's Day" of the Gregorian calendar. New China adopted the Common Era, but in the countryside and among the people, the traditional habit of using the lunar calendar to date and day still continues. This dualistic concept of time is connected to China's deep and long-standing tradition on the one hand, and advanced and convenient time management methods on the other. While modernizing, the "time" of the Chinese fully retains its inherent elasticity and richness.
The Spring Festival is filled with a strong traditional atmosphere, which is the most suitable time and space for us to return to traditional China. I also used to read sociological works such as "Rural China" after a happy reunion with my family. Although the etiquette order and family concepts involved in these works are getting farther and farther away from today's Chinese, they can give us a glimpse of the family structure and family atmosphere in traditional China. We have seen a huge change in the concept of family from the traditional extended family to the modern small family, and the interpersonal relationships within the family are more equal, simpler, and more independent. I once felt something similar when I re-read Dream of the Red Chamber. Some of the contradictions and problems within the big family depicted in the book no longer exist in contemporary Chinese society, which cannot but be said to be a great social progress. Thinking about the beginning of "Dream of Red Mansions", to Ba Jin's "Home", Lao She's "Four Generations in the Same Hall", to Zhao Shuli's "Xiao Erhei Marriage", and Lu Yao's "Ordinary World", the new concepts of marriage and family in the works have gradually replaced the traditional concepts, reflecting the changes in society.
"Home" is an important carrier of Chinese culture, and "home" is very important. Equally important is the hometown. The ancients often called themselves county wangs, such as "Changshan Zhao Zilong", "Yanren Zhang Yide" and so on. However, for modern Chinese, although there is still the concept of hometown, the normalization of migration and the convenience of transportation make hometown and nostalgia no longer so heavy, but in the new time and space, become light and pleasant.
Our hometown is also undergoing great changes in the process of modernization. Take my hometown of Liaocheng, Shandong Province, as an example. Liaocheng used to be an important city on the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, but since the late Qing Dynasty canal was abandoned, it has been in a backward state for a long time. In the early 90s of last century, I traveled from Liaocheng to Beijing to go to school, and it took me seven or eight hours to take a long-distance bus. In the mid-90s, the Beijing-Kowloon Railway was opened to traffic, and Liaocheng had a train for the first time, and it took four or five hours to drive to Beijing. I have been looking forward to Liaocheng being able to connect to high-speed rail. At the end of 2023, Liaocheng will finally enter the "high-speed rail era", and it will only take more than two hours from Liaocheng to Beijing at the earliest. Thinking back to the time when people from Guangdong and Fujian went to Beijing to take the exam, it took several months on the road, and then thinking about the era of long-distance buses, general-speed trains and high-speed railways that I personally experienced, the speed of China's development made me feel a lot of emotion.
Returning to the time and space of traditional China in reading is for us to better understand the present and move towards the future. Take advantage of the holidays to read some old books and classics again.
Initial Reading
Liu Daxian
At the end of the winter year, it is time to read. It is recorded in the "Book of Rites" that the ancients recited in spring, summer strings, autumn rituals, and winter reading, that is, at the end of the year and the beginning of the year, at the time of winter and spring, everything rested, and the mind was quiet, which was suitable for reading. The Spring Festival holiday coincides with this point in time, which is the best time of year for reading.
From the physical, experiential world to the spiritual, transcendent world, all of this is closely related to reading. When I say reading, I don't mean the kind of "pan-reading" of images, videos, etc., but the reading of textual texts.
A person's initial reading often determines his or her lifelong mental framework, way of thinking, perspective on problems, and way of understanding the world and self. It's like opening another eye and opening up a whole new universe, containing infinite time and space, infinite wisdom and infinite charm.
In terms of my own experience, my earliest reading range was extremely limited, but it was nothing more than what I read. When I was in the fourth grade of primary school, I got a copy of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" from my classmates, and I read it after swallowing dates, which was the first famous book I had read in my life, and I realized it many years later, and it had subtly influenced me for many years. I believe that many ordinary Chinese have received education on loyalty, filial piety, righteousness, and heroic complexes come from such popular historical interpretations. Of course, a classic can be interpreted from different angles. For me as a teenager, it laid a broad vision, and the most important thing about the perception of history was to shape a kind of idealistic feeling.
The young man's heart is quite simple, but it does not mean that it is simple. At that time, what attracted me to "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" was not the much-talked about power schemes, wars, etc., but the benevolence and ideals of Shu Han. What touched me was Liu Bei's generosity and kindness in the novel and his rise under the circumstances, as well as the courage of the representative characters of the entire Shu Han Dynasty to "do what they knew they couldn't do". Shu Han was inferior to Eastern Wu and Cao Wei in terms of physical geography and population conditions, which did not prevent Zhuge Liang from going out of Qishan and going north to attack Wei after Liu Bei's death. Jiang Wei never even met Liu Bei, and after Zhuge Liang's death, he inherited and adhered to the ideal of "restoring the Han family" until the end of his life.
Looking back now, my understanding of my youth was not accurate. "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" is of course far from the official history. However, the novel is not a restoration of history, but the narrator's persistence and struggle for his original intention. That's what struck me. It broadens the horizons of a rural teenager and broadens his mind. Therefore, I later thought that the first reading must be to read those classics that have been baptized and tested by time, and can lay the foundation of concepts.
Speaking of my first readings, I remember a newspaper asking me to write an article about children's reading many years ago and asking me to recommend some books. I emphasized the importance of reading written works in the age of electronic media and pictorial narratives. In terms of recommended books, in addition to general knowledge books such as "Five Thousand Years of the World" and "Children's Encyclopedia", several kinds are also recommended: "Journey to the West" helps children to understand the basic world view of the Chinese sensitively, and Confucianism and various miscellaneous knowledge are included in this interesting story; "Robinson Crusoe" is not only a story of personal efforts, but also a fable of how a person grows up in nature and establishes order in chaos.
These recommendations will certainly disagree with someone, and I don't think it's perfect. Many works are actually polysemy, and different age groups will read different meanings. In fact, children may be more tolerant and full of potential than the average adult thinks, and they will make their own choices, provided that they have choices.
During the Spring Festival, whether it is treading the snow to find plum blossoms, or reading to the lantern, whether it is a feast and traveling, or sitting in the book city, it is a good choice. But if you ask me, my answer is the latter.
Typography: Cai Huawei
People's Daily (2024-02-17 08 Edition)