In August 2023, Liu Liangcheng won the 11th Mao Dun Literature Award for his novel "Bemba". Yilin Publishing House's latest "Hometown on the Earth" is its latest work after winning the award, and it is also the return work after many years after many years of moving countless people's prose classic and the exemplary work of Chinese writing, "One Man's Village", with Tao Yuanming's leisurely + Miyazaki's time and space, writing a sincere chapter of the land and hometown, condensing the essence of his ten years of ideology and culture.
"Listening to the barking of dogs at night will make you sleep soundly, and in the morning you will wake up to the sound of birds and insects. "Grow vegetables and feed chickens, watch the crows in the tree in a meeting, slowly grow old under a tree. Quite different from the hustle and bustle of city life for most people, this is the state of the writer Liu Liangcheng's life in recent years.
In 1998, Liu Liangcheng stood in the sunset of Urumqi, looked back at his hometown Huangshaliang affectionately, and wrote "One Man's Village", which caused a sensation in the "Liu Liangcheng fever" across the country, and also built an indelible spiritual homeland for countless people. Since then, he has written and lived in the city. For more than 20 years, "One Man's Village" has been mentioned and reread, touching generations of readers and benefiting thousands of students.
In 2013, Liu Liangcheng lived in Rapeseedgou Village, Mulei, Xinjiang, founded Mulei Academy and served as the president, returning to the pastoral life of sunny farming and rainy reading, and living poetically between ideals and reality. He seems to have returned to the wind and fallen leaves in his early years, entered the state when he wrote "One Man's Village", and completed "Hometown on the Earth". "Hometown on the Earth" is divided into three chapters, namely "Rapeseed Ditch Morning", "Hometown on the Earth" and "Growing into a Big Locust Tree", and the writing vision extends from the village at your feet to the beautiful Xinjiang, and then to the land and rivers and mountains of the motherland. He writes sincere chapters rooted in daily life, about the philosophy of life, natural philosophy and the homeland of the earth, and writes about all things in the world with a delicate brush full of love and compassion.
"'Home on the Earth' is my first essay in ten years. In the past ten years, I have moved from the city to the countryside, bought an old school in the village, and studied and wrote there for retirement. During this period, while cleaning up this yard, I worked as a designer, mason, carpenter every day, and of course sometimes did the work that a blacksmith would do, and I would ...... all the work that I did in that yard From this work, you can see my complete life in the past ten years, the carpentry work I did, the vegetable planting, and even the names of the dogs and cats I had at home will be in these essays. Liu Liangcheng said, "The years here are clear and countable, allowing you to live so clearly and quietly." In this village, I feel my age year by year, and I am also carefully feeling the prosperity and aging of all things in heaven and earth. In my own dim eyes, I saw that the leaves around me were old, the raindrops on the eaves were old, the insects were old, the clouds in the sky were old, and the wind blowing through the valley was also old. ”
The village is full of stories: waking up to the crowing of chickens, working at sunrise, plowing and reading, talking about the things on the earth to the sky, watching the crows holding meetings in the trees, waiting for a mouse to die of old age, and smelling the smell of dreams being smelled by a dog, imagining a hillside full of windows, caring about food and harvests, and slowly growing old under a big tree. These stories that float in the air and are ignored by others are all major events in his life.
The world is also a much bigger rapeseed ditch village. The Xinjiang meal on the long road comforts the tired body and mind of the traveler; a road of more than 300 kilometers long for cattle and sheep to transfer to the field, millions of livestock walk in the middle of it every year, stretching for thousands of years; with the help of unknown old people, all the rituals in the life seem to be a rehearsal for the final grand funeral...... Peace of mind is the place to be, flowers bloom and fall, life and death are busy, and we will all live as our hometown in the end.
In his early 50s, Liu Liangcheng, who had lived in the city for many years, decided to settle in a traditional village at the southern foot of the Tianshan Mountains. This small village preserves his childhood memories and reinforces his knowledge of traditional Chinese culture. In Liu Liangcheng's view, the countryside is the hometown of every Chinese, and a person must always return to his ancestors, which is the Chinese outlook on life, which is endless, passed down from generation to generation, and endlessly. Returning to the village that resembles his hometown, Liu Liangcheng entered a state of creative vigor and wrote "Piggyback", "Bemba" and "Hometown on the Land". To a certain extent, all three works are "homecoming", and he believes that writing is also a homecoming of language, and it is the nostalgia of being far away from his homeland at work: "Every sentence I write is on the way home. ”
"Everyone's hometown is in a lot of dust, and we need to find and claim it. When I was running around, my hometown was also wandering. When I was young, maybe my parents were my hometown. When they are subsumed into the rich soil of their ancestors, I will become the home of myself and my descendants. Everyone will accept what his hometown has given him, and eventually live as his own hometown. In the work of the same title "Hometown on the Earth", Liu Liangcheng wrote sincerely.
Returning to his hometown in Gansu from Xinjiang to worship his ancestors, the tablets and ancestral tombs of his ancestors were impressively visible, which made Liu Liangcheng feel particularly deeply: "In such a hometown land, life is so thick, connecting the sky and the earth, connecting the past and the present. Life has never been a short seventy or eighty years or a hundred years for me, but a thousand years for my ancestors, a hundred years for me, and a thousand years for future generations. ”
If "One Man's Village" is Liu Liangcheng's affectionate look back at his hometown in the city after leaving his hometown, then "Hometown on the Land" is a complete masterpiece in which he relocated his ideal home to the land. From "One Man's Village" to "Hometown on the Earth", from Huangshaliang to Caizigou Village, Liu Liangcheng has never left the rural civilization he is familiar with spiritually. Waking up from the barking of chickens and dogs, cultivating and reading and writing to retire, and living in accordance with nature is a kind of "slow life", and "Hometown on the Earth" also presents a kind of "slow philosophy": "Slowly suffering and waiting in slow things, boiling out a feeling, a taste, a way of life, and a moral concept, this is rural culture and rural philosophy." "Everyone's hometown is in a lot of dust, and we need to find and claim it. When I was running around, my hometown was also wandering. When I was young, maybe my parents were my hometown. When they are subsumed into the rich soil of their ancestors, I will become the home of myself and my descendants. Everyone will accept what his hometown has given him, and eventually live as his own hometown. Each one is his own hometown. "But I know the way back to the past, and of all the roads in the world, the one I know the most is the way back. The old things that people leave behind along the way have the mark of time. "Every night, the moon rises behind the stack of wood on the east side of my house, passes slowly over the roof, and falls behind the mud of the vegetable patch by the wall of my house, like a relative of my own family, but so high that a country boy looks up alone in such a long dark night. "The moon of his hometown, hanging in the sky of a foreign land, was seen by him again. Just like when we read Li Bai's "Silent Night Thoughts" and "Guan Shanyue", we read Li Bai's moon. After a thousand years, the moon became a poem and was preserved in our hearts and collected by us. ”
In addition to allowing you to reclaim your hometown, this book also has a animistic view of life and nature: in the countryside, time is like the shade of a tree, slowly crawling forward on the ground. Settling oneself in nature, the growth and aging of human beings and the birth, aging, sickness and death of all things on the earth are endless, connected as one: "When people are crying, insects are also chirping, and the leaves are rustling, human life is only a part, and human suffering is also a part of the thousands of lives in that world." "We can't let it depend on the warmth of the house, it has to grow its own warmth in the cold of the long winter. "The white grass on the hillside, illuminated by the moonlight. The tree sleeps in its own shadow, and the leaves towards the moon glow with a light that forgets to grow. My raised forehead must have been illuminated by the moonlight, even in the deepest wrinkles. "At that time, I could feel the barking of the dog and the moonlight as each other's language, and they spoke all night. One ear that could understand the moonlight, in a distant dream, listened lonely under the eaves at the foot of the hill where I slept. My other ear clearly heard all the movement outside, and there was not a trace of moonlight. "It drilled into all the smallest crevices, and at the end of each crevice was a cliff, but it didn't believe it, and it saw the smaller crevices in the cliffs, where there was a way out, and I couldn't see it. "There is an ancient and direct spiritual channel between us and the insects, and when the insects chirp in their ears, people already understand and feel them. There are also thousands of insects chirping in people's hearts. ”
There is also a book about work and internal friction - a deep understanding of the life experience of a wise man, from the concept of education to the concept of work to the concept of parenting, refusing to roll in, any confusion can be found here: "A good childhood should have the participation of sunshine and wind." "Today's young people don't read too little, but they read too much. "Work is a good companion of people, some work, if you don't do it, you won't have it, and if you do it, you can't finish it for a lifetime." Even about how to age naturally: "You can't hide from it, you can't hide from it." I would like to spend my old age in such a landscape. "Be brave enough to face the inevitable growth and aging, and reap the peace of mind. In Liu Liangcheng's view, the rapeseed ditch made him quieter, and he felt that old age came so quickly, and when a person became idle, he reached old age. "I'm watching myself grow old in the midst of the song of insects and birds in a yard, and I would have grown old in the shadow of a high-rise building in a neighborhood. I can't hide from it, and I can't hide from it even if I run to the edge of the sky. "I don't know the me in the dream, I don't know what he's going to do in the next dream. I don't have a hand that I can reach out to my dreams awake to arrange my life in a dark sleep. I lived fifty years, at least twenty years, in my sleep. Sleep is another wake-up of my life. I've woken up over and over again in this dark world. The smell of me waking up and falling asleep, was smelled by a puppy named Sun. "Every window used to be the eyes of a family who were in the interior of the village when they picked up the window and looked out. It is possible for me to get a glimpse of their lives through these old doors and windows, and on moonlit nights, the voices of those who have never closed tightly in the cracks of the doors and the deformed window frames seem to return to the house. I would stop behind every window, climb through the window and look out, and I would see the family that had been looking for decades and centuries. I will see what they see, and I will forget what they have forgotten again. "And it seems to me that every person who lies on the ground and dreams is a bottomless rectangular pit. Every dream is a window to the walls of the earth. Flocks of geese, through the windows opened by human dreams, passed through the walls of the earth. "One day I recognized the person who was chasing me in my dream, probably my grown up self. I was caught up by my own growth. A person's growth can make themselves so frightening. ”
If fiction is a trip to a distant place, then prose is a return to home. In the book "Hometown on the Earth", we can see the projection of Liu Liangcheng's deep concern for his hometown, and the artistic achievements full of profound and outstanding philosophical thoughts and romantic poetic imagination will benefit the earth and face the future. This shows the unique value and broad possibilities of literature to help rural revitalization. From "One Man's Village" to "Hometown on the Earth", when literature enters the countryside, it not only finds a broader practice space in the countryside, but also finds a more poetic development path for it, which is more conducive to carrying the Tao with literature, shaping people with literature, and cultivating yuan with literature. (Reader Daily all-media reporter He Jian)