Inside and outside the book丨 Age with dignity
Stills from the movie "Farewell to Love" adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "The Long Day Will End".
People have to study when they are young in order to grow up and live and do things like normal people. When you grow up, you also have to study in order to grow old like a normal person. Like children, aging with dignity is not a natural process, but rather a matter of upbringing and practice. Otherwise, when people are old, they may become what Confucius said, "to be old and not die is to be a thief".
Hemingway and Kazuo Ishiguro are both masters of writing about old people. The two deservedly won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 and 2017 respectively. Hemingway has "The Old Man and the Sea", widely known, in which Santiago, a lonely widower fisherman, in his twilight years, propped up a small boat to go into the sea to fish, and found nothing for 84 consecutive days. On the 85th day, he caught a big fish that was longer than his boat. The fish dragged his boat away for two days and two nights. At sunrise on the third day, he tied the fish to the boat and dragged it back, only to encounter a school of sharks. By the time they were dragged back to shore, the big fish had been eaten by sharks into skeletons. The old fisherman is poor and strong, does not feel sorry for himself, and accepts his bad luck calmly, which is awe-inspiring.
Ishiguro Yuben's 1989 novel The Remains of the Day (Chinese translated as "The Long Day Will End", somewhat reluctantly), is one of the novels I have read repeatedly over the past decade. Two little people who are turning into old men, one is Mr. Stevens and the other is Ms. Kenton. Mr. Stevens had been a housekeeper in a wealthy family all his life, and although he came from a humble background, he was obsessed with personal and professional dignity, and sometimes bordered on pedantic bigotry.
But what is dignity? There are a few analogies in the book. There is a saying that dignity is like clothes and shoes, which cannot be taken off freely in front of people. Another place says that dignity is like the beauty of a woman, which can only be understood, not spoken. Mr. Stevens and Ms. Kenton both worked for large families, and the two had a crush on each other, and after they broke up, they cared for each other. After many unexpected and inadvertent changes, Mrs. Kenton married, and Mr. Stevens continued to be celibate and worked as a housekeeper. The old owner of the manor is gone, and a new owner has arrived.
The new owner asked Stevens to take a vacation in the manor's car. He made a special trip to Ms. Kenton's hometown to visit her. The two reunited after a long absence, and in the dim light, Stevens saw that her face was faintly wrinkled, but the whole person was strikingly consistent with the way he looked when they parted many years ago, which he remembered so deeply: "Although her age is unforgiving, adding some traces of time, at least in my eyes, she looks very gracefully old." "Graceful" is rich in connotations in English, and there is no exact equivalent word in Chinese, neither "decent", nor exactly "elegant", or even "decent", or "solemn and generous". Roughly speaking, a dignified demeanor or temperament.
"The Long Day Will End" book shadow.
Life is inevitably clutched. After many years of separation, how many people will have such a "graceful" feeling when they see old classmates and colleagues again? Everyone gets old, but not everyone gets old "gracefully". In some groups of people, there are more decent, well-behaved and personable elderly people, while in others, such old people are rare.
When he was studying in the Department of Philosophy of Peking University, Mr. Zhang Dainian had already retired. One winter, when he fell ill, the department asked for a car from the school and sent us to take him to the hospital. At that time, he lived on the second floor of a dormitory building in Zhongguanyuan. We rushed to his house and saw that he was walking with difficulty, there was no elevator in the building, and the corridor was black and hollow, so we suggested that he be carried down.
I'm young, I have some strength, and I'm going to carry him. He waved his hand, said, "No, I can walk," and grabbed the handrail down the stairs. We had to go one after the other, half a step apart, and protect him with our bodies, for fear that he would fall. Seeing him stiffen his waist, he was both sad and respectful. He was very sick and it was not easy to get into the car, so we helped him move his legs and feet into the car door. He sat up straight, then turned to thank him.
A few years after coming to the United States, I heard that Mr. Zhang had passed away. Now, I am over half a hundred years old, and I cherish that close encounter more and more. It was a vivid lesson in the dignity of life, and the farther apart and the older I get, the more enduring it becomes, and it reminds me that aging with dignity is not a natural process.
Liu Zongkun
Editor-in-charge: Liu Xiaolei