| Never | a sense of coldness about life
The first time I saw "The Pianist at Sea" was many years ago. I didn't understand 1900 that year, why didn't I want to get off the ship? The genius pianist got off the boat and could still continue to play the piano he liked. He would have been the best pianist, someone with social status and status, but he hadn't.
He stopped between the spiral ladders, looked at the vast city in front of him, turned back, and returned to the Virginia, where he had been all his life. Even if there was a girl he liked on the shore.
The man's name was 1900, and he was spotted by a boiler worker on a ship one early morning in 1900. A child who "doesn't exist" in a social sense. He later became a legendary genius pianist. 1900 is legendary, the embodiment of the dreams, romances, and fears of the 20th century. We in the 21st century look at him like we gaze at some kind of outdated fantasy.
But when I looked at him many years later, I felt very confused. Hey, 1900, isn't that just us.
We were not born on a boat. We get tickets for the big ship at different times, qualifying to participate in the game of the universe. Inside the Virginia, we also tried a number of dazzling ways to live. Movies, music, poetry, or love.
Utopia actually exists, but we dare not be too greedy. Afraid of indulging in it, getting off the ship too late, will be tens of thousands of miles behind others, and can't catch anything. We always have in our minds the indelible projection of the metropolis, the fear of contemporary life.
I was so scared that there was not an inch of my world among the thousands of grids. I am also afraid to stay on the big ship, like in 1900, with the dream of eventual destruction. 1900 is not afraid, because dreams are his reality.
In 1900 he lived his life on a large ship named Virginia. For 1900, it was not just a ship, but a floating city, an enclave that real society could not reach. He spent his life on this ship.
He liked to unlock the fixed lock of the piano when the storm came, so that the notes, the piano and him, swayed with the waves, free. Only on the Virginia, you seem to have nothing, you can have everything that is rare, you have the ability to turn all suffering into pleasure.
Many people got on this ship, expecting it to carry itself to the modern metropolis of beauty, freedom, equality, and prosperity. But you see, 1900 felt that the Virginia was the epitome of the most ideal society. He usually plays for the distinguished guests in the banquet hall, but in the third class cabin he is the freest, he can play as much as he wants, happiness has no rank, and art does not distinguish between noble and low.
Virginia is a true utopia. There is no human cruelty here: no two world wars, no Cold War, no corpses, no blood stains. On this ship every day there are new pleasures happening, and many great people have come, once in this floating city and the legendary pianist have played face-to-face, just to listen to a song, or to fight with him.
For him, the city is confusing and helpless, and every window in front of him is so clear, like a container full of human beings.
People say that after going ashore, there is an ideal life, and New York has freedom, wealth, and stability. The reality, however, was that it was not long before the Great Depression captured New York. Time on the ocean seems to be trance-like, wobbly, restless, and we urbanites define it that way, but the utopia that human greed and ambition cannot invade exists only in that ship.
1900 said, "Land, for me, is too big a ship. I don't know where to start playing this piece. I will never be able to live without this boat. ”
The real Fergilla in history was destroyed in 1954.
Have our fantasies of contemporary life also been destroyed at the same time?
We seem to be reluctant to admit that way of life: it is too unrealistic. The modern city cannot accommodate those who purely pursue life itself. But people can have a variety of choices. There is also no established form to speak of. And how to count as comfortable is not up to others to decide.
I always think of Gauguin as such a person. If 1900 was the one who chose not to get off the ship all his life, Gauguin was a man who got off the boat and then went back to the ship.
Gauguin's father died when he was very young. He spent several years with his mother in Peru as a tropically whipped child. Some say that Gauguin's maternal grandmother may have Been of Peruvian descent, so he had darker skin than the Parisians.
He often called himself a primitive savage. In his bones, there is a rebellion against the high-speed city life. The essence of the "primitivism" he advocated is like this.
Just as I didn't understand why 1900 didn't get off the ship before, I didn't understand Gauguin before. Gauguin changed the moon, and giving up sixpence is a romance that belongs to contemporary people. But seeing that he never saw his wife and children again, and he interacted with artists and quarreled with Van Gogh, I felt that he was too arrogant, selfish, and a little invincible. It is by no means the ideal model we think of.
▲ The Painter of Sunflowers(Portrait of Vincent van Gogh)
Until now I couldn't fall in love with Gauguin. But his paintings, the more I grew up, the more I had different feelings. Gao Geng was the first to speak of the hardships of modern people in that era.
It is said that self-portraits are a reflection of the painter's own image. Gauguin and Van Gogh exchange self-portraits, and he compares himself to Valjean, the protagonist of Les Misérables. A somewhat indomitable tough guy-like hero who fights the darkness, he stands alone in the gray-green shadow, contrasting with the bright and gentle wallpaper. He also mischievously pasted Van Gogh's wallpaper on the wall, announcing that he was different.
▲ Self-portrait, 1888
Looking at his later paintings, he was completely different from the painters of his contemporaries, and had nothing to do with elegance—or rather, he had the elegance he identified. Beauty is natural, wild, but wild and unflinching, with the power of the vast earth.
▲ In the waves (Odine)
▲ the swineherd brittany
Gauguin's trajectory is the opposite of the 1900's. It is precisely because I have seen the impermanence of modern cities that I returned to the "Virginia".
Gauguin returned to France from South America, just when the city of Paris was booming, and the stock thing appeared, he ran to work as a stockbroker, made a lot of money, and married the daughter of a wealthy local businessman. Later he saw the stock market crash of 1882. From the "life among the lattices" in Paris, he saw the embarrassment of fate.
"Since then, I have desperately wanted to escape Paris, to escape my family, to escape my friends, and I have lived in seclusion under the name of Savage".
He went to Brittany, his father's hometown. "There I found a more rugged and primitive natural feeling." While the people of Paris lived modern life, the people of Brittany were still living in a primitive way.
▲ Mango pickers (Martinique)
Gauguin wanted something more simple and straightforward, with lush nature, endless skies and oceans, and the simplest places to live.
The place where all his hopes could eventually be fulfilled was Tahiti, or Tahiti. On one side is an endless ocean, while on the other side are mountains. The house he lived in was between the sea and the mountains.
▲ Orana Maria
If a contemporary person does this, people may secretly evaluate: it seems to be enviable, but in the end it is what loser will do, it is nothing more than fear, right? Escape from modern industry and hide in the so-called carefree place, because the strength is not enough, right?
Since when have we always measured and speculated about the lives of others by our own standards?
I may be a pessimist, thinking that the pursuit of absolute romance is impossible, life is still a chicken feather, there is no absolute "moon". There is a moon, there must be a dark night, this is the truth. What is the use of stuffing sixpence in the hands of people who only want the moon?
All those under the ship felt that Virginia would eventually be destroyed. But 1900 and Gauguin didn't care about these at all. Don't care about big houses, big TV sets, modern high-rise buildings, school district houses, commercial insurance, and dentists. And contemporary urbanites who always think that they have made great money and live to the age of 99 is a model of happiness are actually not so great in their eyes.
I envy these people who have never been on the boat all their lives, they are more determined than I am. The light of the moon that possesses it transcends the darkness and makes those so-called rules worthless. Beauty is indeed a kind of, particularly fragile existence, incompatible with the hard, complex, thorn-ridden life of this world. But we all need a little bit of shimmer. It's something that's so rare that it's worth the effort to chew and digest.
The original article was first published in the public account of "New Weekly" "Miss F Miss F"
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