Movie "Lost in Tokyo"
Some time ago, a piece of news attracted the attention of many people. Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga appointed tetsushi Sakamoto, the first "lonely minister", to solve the problem of loneliness in Japanese society. "Loneliness comes in many forms." He said.
Loneliness is no longer a problem for one person. Especially after the epidemic, the spatial isolation and conceptual differentiation between people have made this sense of loneliness like an "elephant in the room" and can no longer be ignored.
Loneliness is a modern disease, some people write on their faces, some people hide in their hearts.
I just can't help but ask, why are we so lonely?
In Taiwanese writer Guo Johnson's latest novel, "The Seeker", he tells the story of two lonely people, a deserted fate, which has made countless readers sad and fascinated. In this novel, there are encounters, there are separations, there is loneliness, there is weakness, there is heartbreak, there is fear, there is remorse. However, what moved people most was his writing about loneliness.
Movie "Philharmonic City"
In The Seeker, loneliness goes something like this:
I can't explain the feeling of always being alone in the snow, even though I've never had a chance to see real snow.
Or it wasn't snow at all, just something that was vaguely always falling around. I kept imagining a heavy snow to keep myself alive.
When reading this novel, it is appropriate to play Rachmaninoff's "Song without Words" or Liszt's "Sigh". Accompanied by melodious and quiet piano music, slowly enter the inner theater of the characters in the book, where all kinds of emotional dramas that cannot be asked for and want to be told and returned are staged. In the novel, the origin of the story is also when Lin Sang heard the tuner playing Rachmaninoff's "Wordless Song" in his wife's practice room.
If you were born with extraordinary musical talent, but grew up to become a well-known musician, as everyone expected, but an obscure piano tuner, how do you face this huge rupture of fate?
If you are a rich and honored entrepreneur, but in the old age of the suffering of bereavement, leaving you alone, how do you chew this wordless loneliness that is difficult to talk to people?
Movie Manchester by the Sea
This is the protagonist of the novel, "I" and Lin Sang, two people with very different identities, each holding a lonely heart, embarking on a journey to find the piano together...
The same is true of many people's lives, originally with enviable talents or high self-expectations, or huge wealth, superior environment, but fate has its own unpredictable, do not know when, in which place, you are suddenly stuck, out of control. Since then, you have slowly embarked on a wrong path, lonely and confused inside, always feeling that something is wrong.
This is also the path taken by Guo Johnson, the author of this book. He is intelligent and precocious, he began to publish works in high school, and published works after graduating from college, and if he continues to develop in this way, there is undoubtedly a smooth road for writers ahead, and he has also been praised and affirmed by major literary awards. Unexpectedly, however, he fell into severe self-doubt and mental loneliness for thirteen years, did not dare to touch the novel again, and almost completely gave up writing the novel. Later, he often thought back: What happened to me at that time?
01 What happened to me at that time?
In "The Seeker", the tuner goes back on his journey to New York to find the violin, and finally remembers the afternoon when his fate took a sharp turn.
I had that opportunity, the opportunity to start a completely different life. If it weren't for the fact that I never forgot, that summer under the flames and sun, but for no reason I felt the confusion and regret left after a snow -
Maybe it has something to do with everything that happened afterwards, maybe it has nothing to do with it. But unless I go on, I'll never know the answer.
As a result, the scab wound was slowly opened.
Movie "Chongqing Forest"
A four-handed agreement to play together made ben's admiration for the pianist's teenager "I" overjoyed, however, the sudden appearance of a blonde man made this agreement an unfulfilled promise, and could only live in the imagination of the teenager forever. The teenager under extreme loss," clenched his fists, a screw between his fingers. He closed his eyes and heard a long, sharp moan from the screws on the silky Stenvigian." Then he rushed out crying, knowing that no one would find out about his disappearance and chased after him.
Since then, in memory, in his heart, he has been the lonely teenager abandoned by the pianist.
Over the years I've gotten used to being the isolated black key, the other white key that seems to always exist outside the edge of the finger's reach.
He also borrowed the end of the Documentary "Richt: The Mystery" by the German-Soviet grand pianist Hurt:
There are too many troubles in life, and the world is complicated. I hate myself, that's it.
Richter: The Enigma (1998)
However, it was not until many years later that he finally understood that choosing to be a tuner was not due to self-evasion and self-loathing caused by that affair, nor was it a waste of talent, but because it was in line with the truest melody in his heart.
At this point, the snow in his life finally fell.
Dreams are not meant to be chased, nor are they meant to be owned or conquered. It is like your conscience, the truest melody in your heart, not something outside of you.
Rather than being on stage and having to face the unknowability of every performance alone, I think it would be happier to be the object of someone's complete trust and dependence behind the scenes. Not as an accompaniment, not as a reading companion, but as a role similar to that of a pianist, a tuner.
Looking back, how did we become who we are today?
The journey of finding the piano is also a deep self-search journey that everyone has experienced or will eventually experience. Some wounds need to be seen, some stories need to be told.
Well-informed people can break up a bunch of plots; only those who want to understand the world can really tell.
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This journey, the author of the novel, Guo Johnson himself, also spent a full twenty years.
He put it this way in the afterword to the novel:
Thanks to the years, after all, I couldn't have been so brave and honest twenty years ago. If you ask me, what exactly does The Seeker mean to me? Perhaps the answer is that I finally faced the deep self-doubt of those thirteen years, feeling scarred and tired, and confused. And after the age of fifty, I accepted frankly that this was the price that as a person like me, I was always pursuing a kind of touch that did not have a conversion scale in reality, and I had to pay.
All paths are ultimately the path to the self.
So Guo Qiangsheng wrote "The Seeker" in an attempt to cross the collapse that had occurred in his life and return to Ground Zero.
Ma Shifang commented on "The Seeker": This book not only writes about the darkness of the abyss, but also writes about the beauty of the incomprehensible.
If life is a concert, we don't need to play wonderfully and excited all the time, because, "the silent part is also playing, remember." ”
02 Listen to the slight sound of two souls resonating
In the beginning, we were all just souls, not bodies. When God wants to fleshize the soul, the souls are reluctant to enter the form that will be sick and old, and will not be able to travel freely through time and space. So God came up with a way to get the angels to start playing intoxicating music.
The music was so intoxicating to the souls that they wanted to hear it more clearly. However, the only way to hear that music more clearly is through one channel, and that is the human ear. Thus God's tricks succeeded, and the soul has a body.
The Seeker opens with such a dexterous and fascinating fable. "Ask the world, what is love, and the Orthodox People Live and Die?" The ancient sigh has a new allegorical dimension in Guo Johnson's pen. Music is to the piano as the soul is to the body, as the scholar Wang Dewei accurately pointed out in the preface: "It does not matter whether you become a piano master or not." Even if you conquer the piano, conquer the music fans, and can't tame your body and soul, it is in vain. ”
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The tuner in the novel, whose appearance is not proud, has been covering the bald top of the head with a duck-tongue hat for many years, only a pair of beautiful hands to attract praise, bone and flesh, slender knuckles, is his "only beautiful miracle above and below the flesh". He was over forty years old, still alone, and he felt like an old piano that no one wanted to touch. Guo Johnson described his protagonist this way: "He is very lonely, he dare not say that he loves music. The piano is the instrument of music, and he places his emotions on the object of the piano. ”
The soul is originally equal, but the body is not, so in the human world, the only equality can only be done by art.
If the flesh is removed, I, the pianist, Emily, Lin Sang, Teacher Qiu... What kind of world will we live in? Is our encounter a completely different story?
If the soul enters the right body, will all the regrets not happen? Many people may have asked this question in their hearts.
Guo Johnson said in an interview: "A lot of the loneliness that bothers you is related to the flesh. On the one hand, the artist pursues the absolute self, but as a human being, falling between the most basic human worlds, how should he reconcile? As a writer who is good at writing about the obsession and hatred of the gay world, he is well aware of the pain caused by the law of discord between the soul and the body.
So, can loneliness be solved?
In "The Seeker", Guo Johnson gave the answer no.
Just as the body and soul cannot be easier.
Just as it is easy to attain the law of absolute harmony of Pythagoras?
Just like between people, there is no fixed score to play.
The mistake made by ordinary people is that they never understand how complex and unpredictable the human heart is, thinking that there is always a ready-made set of musical scores in the world, teaching them how to play each other.
Loneliness requires only being seen and accepted, even if it is only a short ray of light.
Therefore, the seven-year-old child and the twenty-four-year-old Teacher Qiu, the seventeen-year-old teenager and the thirty-four-year-old pianist, the forty-three-year-old middle-aged and sixty-year-old Lin Sang, although the tuner is lonely, at different stages of life, he also hears the subtle sounds of the vibrations of the two souls.
Although, sometimes, this pushes him deeper into pain and loneliness.
At the end of this piano hunting trip, Lin Sang said to the tuner: "Before I go back, you will help me take good care of the piano at home, can you promise me?" ”
Looking into the palm of his hand, the tuner remembered the pain left by a certain engagement, long ago.
One by one, one by one, one relationship after another, everyone's emotions and life are played with an unforgettable melody of ups and downs.
Different from the "love" often said by modern people, "love" is a more oriental cultural concept, which points to the inexplicable but haunting bondage and attachment between people. In The Seeker, I read the most moving interpretation of the concept of "love" or "piano".
Everyone has an innate resonance program, some people look for it in the instrument, some people look for it in the song, and some people are luckier to find a vibration that can awaken to the past, the present, and the future in the vast world.
It could be something called love. It could also be something called trust. It's not so much that we're listening to the piano, but rather that what we're listening to is the passing away. Every key spits out only the present moment, which can never be repeated.
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Each of us is like a tuner, lost in disappointment and longing, and then in the touch between the heart and the outside world, we seek inner peace, seek the resonance of the soul, and finally move towards reconciliation with time, with self, and with destiny. Reading this novel, it is as if listening to the words that fall on the jade plate, entering the depths of their hearts, those indescribable feelings, those who have lost in time, are gently placed in the novel.
The author said in the afterword: "The more manic and turbulent the age, the more you must know how to tune yourself." ”
In the midst of manic turmoil and loneliness, how can people play and tune their hearts, let the soul and body play the truest melody, and hear the subtle sounds of their soul resonating with another person and with the world?
Everyone is a violin seeker.
Guo Qiangsheng looked back half of his life, talked to his past self, wrote a touching soul monologue, captured the subtle and indescribable emotional tone, triggered the reader's long resonance, and may give you some inspiration.
The subtle sound of soul resonance, as long as you have heard it before, the loneliness is no longer terrible.
👇 The Violin Seeker