Living elsewhere,
In the desert ocean,
A physical and spiritual adventure that spans his vast expanse.
The ghost of the flood had just dissipated.
- Jean-Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (19th-century French poet)
In reality, we all want to escape from the chickens and dogs around us, like Strickland in "The Moon and Sixpence", completely break with the absurd and ordinary life, and pursue the most beautiful moon in our hearts. Life is always elsewhere, a distant and unknown place, emitting a snowy and poignant light, beautiful and stubborn.
Swiss writer Pascal. Messier's classic "Lisbon Night Train" tells the story of a man who bid farewell to the old life because of a book, and began a pilgrimage to pursue the idol in his heart, which is also a journey of self-soul. This book is his third novel published in 2004, translated into 15 languages, sold millions of copies, and won the Best Foreign Language Novel award at the Shanne Cavo Literary Prize in Italy.
The Chicago Sun once commented: "Praise the elegance and beauty of the language of this work." The author skillfully deals with concepts such as loneliness, memory, and language, so that we understand that we know very little about others and the world. ”
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"The day of the great change in the life of Raymond Golegris begins no differently from countless other days."
Guided by the suspense thrown out by the first sentence of the novel, I saw that the protagonist's life was stable, regular, and monotonous and consistent. The protagonist, Golegris, is more than half a hundred years old and stereotypical like an antique museum. On a rainy morning, he rescued a woman on the bridge who was full of temperament and mysterious colors, which is also the cause of the story. At night in the bookstore, he came across a book called "The Alchemist of Words", which was quiet and wonderful, like a faded silver ornament, like a mysterious song from a golden constellation, which flowed into his life and aroused his doubts about life. He embarked on the bus to Lisbon in the dark of night, just to explore the meaning of life.
Rimbaud's poem reads: "Living elsewhere". The night train to Lisbon is a metaphor for another spiritual world beyond the real world, it leads to life elsewhere, it leads to the unknown and the unincorporated future, it leads to the blazing and free soul return.
What does it mean for Golegris, a man over half a hundred years old, to give up everything he knows and run to another distant and unfamiliar place in a bumpy state?
He found poetry and distant places in the book "The Alchemist of Words", the western heaven after the ninety-nine eighty-one difficulties, the place where milk and honey flowed, and the unparalleled sacred spiritual belief.
This mysterious man of thought resonance, the Portuguese nobleman Prado, was a light from another world, not dazzling but warm, illuminating him so that he could no longer see the sixpence on the ground around him.
To cure a lonely person, it takes another lonely person.
Golegris resolutely embarked on a double physical and mental adventure, a journey of self-soul search.
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But when do you set out to explore a person's inner world? Is that a journey that will come to an end? Is the mind the home of truth? Are the so-called facts a deceptive shadow in their own stories?
Really read a book, get to know a person completely. It is not enough to rely on images and words in the book, to go to the place where he has lived, to see the sky he has seen, to follow the path he has traveled, to feel the melody of Prado's life in this story of the sky, the rainstorm and the words.
"Lisbon Train" is one person indulging in another person's past, alluding to our real pursuit of love and freedom. Every page of the book is soaked with the taste of memories, which is a short-lived brilliance in Golegris's life, leading to the trajectory of Prado's shadowy life.
The book "The Alchemist of Words" is the key thread of the whole story, and all of Prado's stories and ideas flow out of this book, colliding with The Mountain of Golegris's mind.
Written by Pascal. Messier tells this delicate and sad story in a typical one-line narrative style, full of philosophical words. In the narrative of "Lisbon Night Train", there are hidden bright and dark lines: the bright line is The life of Golegris who compromises with reality, and the dark line is prado's life full of ideals and ambitions. One takes place in the present and the other in the distant past, and in the double chanting of light and dark, the story unfolds methodically, beautifully and beautifully.
"If we live on only a small part of our hearts, what should we do with the rest?"
"When we are young, we live as if we will never die. The perception of death is like a roll of fragile paper that stirs around us but cannot touch the skin. ”
The everyday values of Golegris collapsed in the face of this sentence, Pascal. Messier used Prado as a breakthrough to tell his own philosophical words. So who is Prado, the author of The Alchemist of Words?
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"When the monotonous sound of the wheel carries us to a life in the past, no matter how short the past is, it allows us to sail to ourselves and back to our own world."
Prado, the author of The Alchemist of Words, was born during the Portuguese dictatorship, the son of a judge, and belonged to a prominent local family. Under the intervention of his family, he had to abandon his writing to practice medicine and save his life.
Under the dark dictatorship of Portugal at that time, which dominated Europe, Prado actively participated in the underground resistance movement in order to save his compatriots, and his clinic became an important stronghold of the underground elements at that time. In this pre-dawn darkness, he witnessed the mutilation of countless of his countrymen. He put his wandering, pain, and pathos into his pen and realized his ideals and persistence in the text. Years later, his writing met Golegris and awakened the mediocre man.
The significance of Golegris's travel in Lisbon Night Train is not that he finally arrives somewhere, but that he is bits and pieces on the journey. At the end of the open end of the novel, he is not completely cut off from his past life, and the sudden illness pulls him back to his original life, but this has a different meaning for him, a kind of warmth and long-lost happiness to regain the fireworks of the world.
Life is a long journey, and the most important thing is not the end that will be reached, but the ups and downs along the way, all the things you experience, all the scenery you see, all the people you meet.
The beautiful life is always a cold wonderland at the end of the world, a moldy dream in the pillow, a person in the dream that can never be owned.
In the desert, the ocean,