(Everyone's little book, the Taoist poet Li Bai and his suffering)
The book to recommend today is one of the "Little Books for Everyone" series: "The Taoist Poet Li Bai and His Suffering". I learned that this series was caused by several accidents, after work one day more than a year ago, my wife had something to pick me up, and when I got downstairs from her company, I learned that there were still one or twenty minutes to leave work, so I sneaked to the foreign bookstore next door (although I took the name of the foreign bookstore, but in fact, the main thing I sold was Chinese books).
Straight to the Wenshizhe area began to pick and choose, a row of similarly bound, colorful small books attracted my attention, picked a few, even in the dangdang did not find a sale, it happened that the bookstore's Wenshizhe books in the 50% discount promotion, so i bought 4 "Everyone's Little Books" series of books in one go. The book "Li Bai" was bought by me again when I visited foreign bookstores.
The reason for the publication of the "Little Books for Everyone" series is very clear in the general preface, "Everyone's small books are not very large, and readers can put them in their pockets and pull them out anytime and anywhere to read a few pages." When waiting for people on the side of the road, when waiting in line to buy theater tickets, in the car, in the park, you can read. "The wish of Editor-in-Chief Yuan is very beautiful, and I also agree very much, if the book can be designed as a paperback version, I can't really carry it."
(Landscape painting)
The binding of the book is simple and has a sense of design, the solid color cover has a large blank space, and the title and the author's name are vertically typeset on the right side, as if it is an inscription poem on a landscape painting. The blank space of the cover is not completely empty, and several interlaced lines outline the simple beauty of modern art, if you look at it as a landscape painting, the black ink line is a mountain, a water, and a shore.
Although this book looks unremarkable, it has experienced more than 80 years of ups and downs, and it has been republished in one edition. First published in August 1940, it is still a must-read book for the study of Li Bai's poetry. The poetic language of prose makes the book very wide-ranging, and the research concept of "delving into the world of poets" makes the theoretical results of the book forever outdated. Because the analysis of the poet's personality and even the spiritual world is the purest, the appearance of the poet is outlined from the outside in, and then the poet's inner world is analyzed and understood, and this method of analysis captures the essence of the poet in life.
(Teacher Li Changzhi)
Teacher Li Changzhi uses one of the "empathy" methods, and the use of "empathy" in the study of history, literature and other people can be said to be very extensive, and one of the books I like very much, Ke Wen's "Discovering History in China" also uses this method. "Empathy" gets rid of the shackles of Western positivism and Chinese theory of evidence, redirects the goal of humanistic research to "people", and makes academic works more readable.
The protagonist of this book, Li Bai, may only be known about him by his heroism and the good name of "Who Immortal", and the name of the Romantic poet makes him less popular. Since ancient times, Li Du also said, "Words and Li must be said, words du do not have to say Li", in the eyes of the old man of Tuo'an, Lao Du's poetry is really powerful, although Li Bai has weather and artistic conception, but often a wave, emotions are poured out, lack of restraint, but not beautiful.
The mainstream Chinese aesthetic is that concealment is more touching than catharsis, blank space is more interesting than full, freehand is more charming than the brush, this view mixes the culture of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, Confucianism is the main body, pay attention to self-denial and retribution, Buddha's Tao is two wings, one advocates nature, and one is well versed in the word "enlightenment".
(Li Bai drinking alone)
Teacher Li Changzhi originally intended to co-write the five great Chinese poets (Qu Yuan, Tao Qian, Li Bai, Du Fu, and Li Shangyin), so the book is always compared with five people, but I prefer to look at Li Bai and Su Shi. "Nature" as a clue connecting the two has different meanings and manifestations in each of them.
"Man's Law, Earth's Law, Heaven's Law, Dao's Nature", Li Bai's nature is the Tao of all things, and the contradiction between his pursuit of "Tao" and "Nature" and his desire for "Fame and Fortune" has created his lifelong suffering. When he was born, he longed to return to the hidden mountains and forests, and when he was clothed, he never forgot to go out of the forest, and the perfect embodiment of such a double pursuit was Lu Zhonglian, but history finally only created a Lu Ranger, and the naïve expectation made Li Bai always in the pain of unhappiness.
On the other hand, Su Shi's "nature" is more to absorb the ideas of the Buddhist family, so that he can settle down several times after being degraded several times, and often create works that have been handed down to the world in the process of his settlement. Su Shi also suffered, but as depicted in the Book of Xuetang, he was eventually able to achieve reconciliation and exoneration. Su Shi was even more intimate to me, he was gifted, but he was not a strong-willed politician, and I was often troubled by indecision.
(Su Shi)
The character of Chinese Confucians is more like the personality of a politician, such as Wang Anshi's courage, integrity, and determination, Chinese culture is eclectic, and Shihe Dao occupies a very important position in the cognition of ancient literati, colliding with brilliant poetic works. The personality of the talented person is the character of the poet, and the Confucian concept is full of discord, contradictions and pain constitute the background of the Chinese poet, and to understand this is to understand the Chinese poet.
Excerpts from this book:
If in Qu Yuan's poems it is expressed that the struggle for ideals (Ideal), in Tao Qian's poems it is expressed in the struggle for freedom (Freiheit), in Du Fu's poems it is expressed in the struggle for human nature (Menschichkeit), in Li Shangyin's poems it is expressed as striving for love (Liebe) and for beauty (Schonheit), then in Li Bai's poems, there are also objects of struggle that are also expressed. This is life and life (Leben).
......
It was just that he demanded too strongly, disillusioned, and failed too badly, so all aspects were like the flooding of the Yellow River, breaking the embankment and out of the ordinary track. Thus the average man admires in him that his exaggeration is surprising, and that of the liberator who has attained a scale and a claw, but few realize that he is fundamentally the closest to the depths of anyone's soul.