Life is an unwinnable battle - Alexander Masters, Rewind Life

In fact, just from the title of "Rewind Life" simply imaginary, it is difficult to associate it with the tramp, to be honest, the first time I saw this book, I think it should belong to the chicken soup book for the soul, but when I opened it, I found that this was a very special story, which is a group that we hardly pay attention to or even a little disgusted - the tramp.

The protagonist of the biography, Stuart Short, is arguably the "least romantic" of the underclass of society, a thief who robs supermarkets and post offices, a wanderer who sleeps on the streets, a drug addict, a hijacker who takes his own son hostage, a "knife-wielding gangster Dan", a "bastard maniac on the fourth basement floor", and a regular visitor to various prisons in Cambridgeshire.

His life was full of violence, rage, and confusion, but he was also often flashed with wisdom and inspiration.

The book is written using flashbacks, and the author Alexander spent years intervening in the various aspects of the homeless man's chaotic life, he experienced, he listened, he investigated like a detective, and the two people whose life trajectories originally had no intersection developed a warm and unexpected special friendship in the chaotic and crazy wandering years.

Step by step, Stewart took his life backwards, and Alexander was responsible for helping him sort out what changed Stewart's life and completely murdered him as a normal person.

In 1999, Ruth Wyner and John Brock, the two directors of the Winter's Warm Homeless Shelter in Cambridgeshire, were sentenced to 5 and 4 years in prison respectively for clandestine drug dealing in the shelter and for Ruth and John's refusal to provide the police with a list of drug dealers who had no hard evidence to support.

The directors of "Winter Warmth", volunteers, heads of other charities and some political party members plan to organize a huge event in solidarity with the release of "Cambridge Double Britain".

Stewart contributed his unpretentious inspiration in ungrounded ideas such as "framing police undercover", "throwing stones at the window of the judge's house", "sinking Cambridge's rowing boats to the bottom of the water when Oxford and Cambridge universities held rowing competitions".

He helped Alexander organize and plan speeches, his stories and appeals were marvelously contagious; he maneuvered with the police on how to cleverly circumvent court bans; and in the end, he directed one of the most successful scenes of the campaign: organizing homeless people and volunteers to sleep on the sidewalks outside the Ministry of the Interior building for three days and three nights, intercepting the Home Secretary, putting pressure on him, and releasing Ruth and John.

Alexander was involved throughout the event because Stewart said he wanted the protest to serve two purposes. First, create momentum and attract public attention. Second, and one of his interests, the people who teach me and all of us to live 'so enjoyable' life know what it's like to be on the street. ”

On the first day, Alexander felt good, "sleeping more than 6 hours for the first time in months". From the next day on, the wandering life began to be difficult, the uncomfortable hard ground and the howling wind were just the discomfort brought to the body by the dining wind, and what really eroded people's psychology was a kind of unconfidence to surrender to emptiness.

"When life gets so boring, you have to invent a purpose, and the job of picking up scrap newspapers makes you a hobby and makes the streets clean." Or so do you think so. Then one day you wake up and find that all of this is a hoax: you used to think you had escaped from the edge of madness, and in fact, you came to the edge of madness".

Alexander even had to defend himself by picking grammatical errors in the restaurant's menu, because, "after only 36 hours on the street, the world was already whizzing by, leaving me far behind." ”

The solidarity campaign was successful, and the "Cambridge Double Ying" was released after 6 months of imprisonment, but Alexander could no longer leave this unromantic wandering crowd, he looked for them like a "deep-sea diver", felt their despair, lamented their love, and thought about the contradictions and drawbacks of social security.

"The Stuarts didn't just sleep under the stars because of bad luck and a loss of 'self-esteem', but also endured the pain of low physical temperature in the garbage heap. So it's not as simple as giving them encouragement, giving them vocational training and funding to get them back on their feet. For them, every day is a song of random violence. ”

Such a "dazzling" Stewart is a complex and chaotic contradiction. If a man can only have one portrait, then irritability and anger are what he freezes in the eyes of most people, he has serious self-destructive tendencies, is extremely unstable, and because he suffers from muscular dystrophy, his walking is crooked and slow like a dangerous footnote.

When Stewart first went to Alexander's house for an interview, Alexander suspected that Stewart would steal valuable things from his house, and when he made tea in a panic, the tea was sprinkled on the carpet.

Stewart was also quite dissatisfied with Alexander's manuscript, feeling "boring to death", and he even felt helpless about his own voice on the tape recorder, but in such a completely peaceful communication process, Alexander still pieced together Stewart's subtle and seemingly charming and touching points.

He is not a charismatic villain who "steals and has a way", nor is he a criminal legend that can trigger "decadent worship", he is not even cruel and cold-blooded, he is a "borderline personality disorder" patient who loves to watch archaeology programs more than action movies. When the "rewind" slowly continues, his story finally appears in a truly cruel and terrifying plot.

Stuart's reaction to the sale of wood carvings of "chainsaw-cut mushrooms" on the side of the road was that the mushrooms had been tortured beyond recognition, so why should they be abused like this? Even in the worst days of street fighting of the year, he had never experienced such cruel abuse!

It was a moment of strange compassion that flooded Stewart. At the same time, he also has a lot of very "homely" intimate, he made "prisoner curry rice" despite the cheap ingredients, but the taste of Alexander praised; Alexander did not have change to take the bus, he generously provided him with the 5 pounds he planned to go to the bar to spend; he bought his son a golf club for a birthday present under the financial crisis of drug addiction and alcoholism, "with a smile in his eyes".

How did he end up on the streets? When did inner violence awaken? He fights in prisons and on the streets in a "desperate" way, but he is so self-loathing that he wants to destroy himself and get relief in the form of self-harm, and he burns chopped fat oil in conflicts with his neighbors because "the devil in my body must be burned" and "only hopes to escape from madness".

Stewart was like an onion, at first it was the purple color of an angry hippie, and then he didn't seem to deliberately turn around, but if he peeled off his slightly lighter layer of color, and how much pain he had experienced in his life, he was not willing to do it like a psychiatrist, while calculating "this guy is charged by the hour", while telling the truth in a collapsed posture.

He was always ashamed of himself, his story was actually quite cruel, but he never deliberately showed sorrow. Happy, enthusiastic, and carefree before the age of 10, he held his brother's hand to school every day; after discovering that he had muscular dystrophy, he was forced to attend "a school for children with disabilities, where he was ridiculed and bullied."

After the age of 12, life was full of "black fog", and he was sexually assaulted by his own brother, temporary nanny and teacher of the "Children's Care Home". Since then, the use of violence has been his only response to dirt and hurt.

He had more reasons than anyone else to exaggerate his life's experiences, but Stewart didn't, "Many children have been bullied, but they have all come over, and they have become responsible people." I consider myself a lunatic other than me."

He is sometimes more like a child, the guilt in his heart is greater than the anger, he often broke down for no reason, thought about suicide, but after learning the news of the suicide of his abusive brother, his first thought was "My brother committed suicide in May, I can't let my mother suffer that anymore."

For most of Stewart's life, he was "trying to forget those experiences." I work hard every day, but this is a battle I can never win."

Stewart's death was a mystery, and in the summer of 2002, near midnight, he was hit by a train, and even the coroner could not determine whether it was a suicide or an accident.

And "rewind" Near the end of the chapter, I finally read the thick warmth without any cruel embellishments—Stewart's last "violent crime" was pronounced "inadmissible" by the court; Stewart was finally satisfied with Alexander's manuscript, and the two laughed and discussed what to give the book a name.

At his sister's house, Stewart happily tries on the shirt he was going to wear at his sister's wedding, thinking that his life is finally "on the right track."

Although the ending is known, after witnessing a journey of life stripping away the cocoon, and possibly even breaking the cocoon into a butterfly, the end of this life suddenly arrived in such a way, which is still regrettable.