Ask the canal to be as clear as promised, for there is a source of living water.
——Zhu Xi, "Living Water Pavilion Viewing Book has a sense of one"
In the first half of 2021, a total of 42 books were read, and the top ten reads were as follows:
"The Water of the Waves": Holding the simple and humble, knowing that it is not used
Dealing with the world is an examination topic that everyone has to face, although "all things are knowledgeable, and human feelings are articles", but there are a few people who can really reach the realm of insight and the realm of cultivation. You and I are mortals, nothing more than to draw on fame, to be profitable, whether successful or not, if you can maintain your independent personality and inner belief in many square inches, it is rare.
"The Water of the Waves" is a classic official novel, the title of the novel is obviously taken from Qu Yuan's "The water of the waves is clear, you can mao wu miao; the water of the waves is muddy, you can be muddy", but there are few clear people in the work, there are many turbid people, the so-called "water of the waves", such as the mirror flower water moon, is finally extravagant talk.
The novel tells the story of the growth of an intellectual, but also a history of destruction that cannot be turned back. The tension between process and result, the struggle between thought and action, and the contradiction between ideal and reality are vividly displayed in the protagonist Chi Dawei. In a system of upward accountability and one-vote veto, man is naturally reduced to Aristotle's "political animal", alienated (Marx) and repressed (Freud) in an unhealthy atmosphere, which leads to impotence in personality, from the mouth to the heart, by the person.
"The Water of the Waves" has a very distinct realistic color and critical significance, in the rapidly flowing society, life is also suspended, money has become a barometer of society, and power has become the scale of the individual. In this "dual" driven society, those who stick to their original intentions and "I have been around with me for a long time, rather than be me", are either assimilated or marginalized, and have become helpless victims in the wrapping of money and power. What is even more desperate is that this dilemma seems to be what Mr. Lu Xun called the "array of nothing", unable to see any enemies, but constantly undergoing systematic attacks.
Of course, the art of fiction emphasizes exaggeration, not avoids extremes, "The Water of the Waves" is indeed exaggerated, the system is not like Hobbes's primitive jungle, there is a "war of all people against all people", and there is not so much deceit and conspiracy. Rather, the vast majority of them are ordinary people, doing ordinary things in ordinary posts, and living ordinary lives.
But for those within the system, the book is still worth reading. Especially for those who have lofty ideals, how to integrate into it and withdraw from it, how to make a wide range of good friends and achieve success, this is a question worth pondering. As a sentence in the "Cai Gen Tan", "Holding the simple and humble, knowing that the cleverness is not used"; or more accurately, "Snobbery, those who are not close are clean, and those who are close but not stained are especially clean; those who are clever and clever, those who do not know are high, and those who know and do not use are especially high." ”
"Using Yourself as a Method: Talking to Xiang Biao": Rebuilding the Spirit of Dialogue
Raymond Aron says that a society of dialogue is the key to humanity. I wasn't interested in books like interviews and dialogues before, but after reading Márquez's "The Fragrance of Guava" and Haruki Murakami's "The Owl Takes Off at Dusk," my taste also began to turn, and I gradually gained a deeper understanding of Raymond Aaron's words.
The spirit of dialogue is an indispensable basic quality of a healthy and benign society. Whether it is oral dialogue or written dialogue, only through dialogue can we understand each other's positions and clarify each other's expressions. Diverse voices can lead to a hundred schools of thought, thus contributing to the construction of inclusive public living spaces. Observing the online public opinion in recent years, it is full of subjective prejudice centered on self-expression and violent atmosphere and even yin and yang strange atmosphere that is not good at speaking, which is undoubtedly a pathological public discussion, which invisibly erodes the healthy body of a benign society.
"Using Yourself as a Method - Talking with Xiang Biao" is a dialogue between Xiang Biao and Wu Qi, two generations of Peking University people, through the interaction of questions and answers, colliding with more possibilities in thought. Although many of the views in the book cannot be agreed, when I read the wonderful points, I can't help but marvel at the ideas of the two people. I know that this is a moment of reading, with the expressor to have a mental resonance and spiritual resonance, and this current reading experience in the process of reading is very valuable, I greatly cherish such a moment of happiness. When all the moments trickle into the sea, they will complete the self-transformation of rebirth.
Using ourselves as methods is not just a theoretical thought experiment, but also a pattern of behavior that can be clearly achieved. As the self, it is completely self-sufficient. In my opinion, as long as the self generates its own organic value and constructs its own soul order, it can realize human reproduction.
In a fluid world, a fluid dialogue begins, with the self as the target and the self as the anchor, so that it can respond to grand propositions and locate small individuals.
"The Island of Yesterday: Dai Jinhua's Selected Film Articles": The other is the other of the self
On July 4, 2016, Abbas Chiarostami passed away. Suddenly, "the film began in Griffiths and ended in Abbas" once again swept through the Chinese online world with the east wind of nostalgia and sadness. But even if it is authoritative, Godard's famous statement cannot monopolize the final interpretation of the beginning and end of the film. I prefer this quote from Orson Wells, "Cinema is the best toy invented for adults." "Of course, the film is not just a toy, it has more complex functions and depth of value. In this regard, Teacher Dai Jinhua's "Island of Yesterday" is an excellent "instruction manual" for understanding movies.
Professor Dai Jinhua is familiar with cultural studies and women's studies, and the research in this area seems to be "small and incompatible", which can be smoothly and harmoniously grafted onto film research. That is, the author builds a bridge between cultural studies, women's studies and film studies, so that the three can dialogue and interact, new perspectives collide with new perspectives, and new perspectives give rise to new theories.
What Christian Meitz calls "theory as ideographic practice" is equally applicable in the study of film theory. This book is a collection of papers by the author, which is the author's starting from the film, thinking about many historical and current events, analyzing many political and social issues, and intervening in the production and reproduction process of the academic knowledge and theoretical paradigm with penetrating observation and insightful interpretation.
Of course, the other is always the other of the self. As an objective and independent "other", any analysis and criticism of the film text is a re-creation. The creator's intellectual background and value concept inevitably precede the transcendental, thus escaping from the text realm and becoming an independent work.
However, Professor Dai Jinhua's understanding and excavation of films, in my opinion, no one in China can stand out. Profound academic literacy, profound theoretical foundation, unique research paradigm, and rigorous academic philosophy are reflected in Teacher Dai's film research. Reading Teacher Dai's book is not only a new understanding and re-expression of the film, but also a shock reaction and shock experience to the heart.
"Documentary of China's Fertility Revolution (1978-1991)": Development is the best contraceptive
Looking at the hot words of the past few years: Buddhism, social animals, workers, inner scrolls, lying flat... From the perspective of social psychology, it undoubtedly conveys the extremely anxious, pessimistic and even desperate emotions of contemporary young people, and profoundly reflects the spiritual state of this era. The deep logic behind it is the fundamental shaking of young people's "labor to get rich" and "distribution according to work", and it is the helpless self-ridicule that cannot see hope, so they choose the passive resistance of non-violence and non-cooperation. Like the "Red Queen Hypothesis" in Alice in Wonderland – in this kingdom, you have to keep running to stay where you are. In the fast-moving modern society, even if they work very hard, many people are still pushed off the track by housing prices, 996 and so on.
In 2021, the results of the seventh census were announced, and although the official still gave an affirmative and positive interpretation, public opinion was still full of pessimistic arguments. Immediately after that, on May 31, 2021, the "three-child policy" was officially introduced. A major adjustment in population policy is not a positive response to the population problem, but as one paragraph puts it, "I don't buy Rolls-Royce because of purchase restrictions?" I can't afford it. "Even if a strong supporting policy is introduced, I am afraid it will be difficult to arouse the people's willingness to have children, and many surveys also illustrate this problem."
Out of curiosity about China's family planning and population policy, I read this book "Documentary of China's Fertility Revolution (1978-1991)". The author, Chen Jian, worked for ten years at the State Family Planning Commission from 1986 to 1995, and has a unique channel of understanding of the historical evolution and practical effects of China's family planning policy.
So far, China's family planning policy has gone through the following stages: late scarcity (1970s) - one-child (1979) - single-woman household (1991) - double one-child two children (2011) - single two children - comprehensive two children (2015) - comprehensive three children (2021). In the author's view, the "late scarcity" policy of the seventies, which was originally the correct practice, was alienated into a universal "one-child" policy in the eighties due to haste and sloppiness. From the perspective of the effect of policy implementation, the "one-child" policy has caused many undesirable results, such as the accelerated arrival of population aging, serious imbalance in gender ratio, labor shortage, "Four-one-two syndrome", risk families, structural defect risk, one-child aging, post-aging, empty nest aging and so on.
From the book's point of view, the author's "one-child" policy is undoubtedly a complete denial - "years of family planning policies have played almost no role in reducing women's fertility levels." Specifically, for example, "the 'one-child' birth policy maintained since the early 1980s is actually the inclusion of the life and livelihood of every person in the country, an attempt to achieve planned management of population growth, by managing the sexual life of every woman of childbearing age and her spouse, and then implementing birth control measures for every woman of childbearing age, and jointly managing the birth of every child, going to the household registration, seeking medical treatment and schooling, thus fully embodying the ubiquitous planning power or the deep intervention of state power in individual rights." As far as the revolutionary changes in the fertility policy are concerned, the 'one-child' policy is actually a national political elite under the planned economic system, taking the concept of zero-growth population under scientific discourse as the guide, and under the guidance of realizing the 'four modernizations', that is, catching up with and overtaking, a set of comprehensive control systems for fertility established by using a highly centralized system. Because this policy has a relatively large distance from the willingness of the broad masses to have children in real life, it is bound to be resisted by the broad masses, and the result of compulsory implementation affects people's reproductive rights and brings very negative consequences. For example, "no country like China, which spends huge social investment and huge social costs, has a demographic imbalance, and no country requires a couple to have only one child, so that individual families make heavy sacrifices, so that the future of the country and society breeds huge risks." Another example is "the defects and deficiencies in the formation of the current fertility policy: the content of the established policy cannot be discussed, the lack of understanding of the inherent laws and characteristics of population growth, and the lack of clear judgment of the conclusions given by practice." The result of the 'one-child' fertility policy is not to have fewer births but to more. Dialectics is so ruthless, you want people to have fewer children, adopt the strictest birth policy, but the result is just the opposite, the adoption of a more relaxed birth policy, but the population control has reached a more ideal state. ”
Since the reform and opening up, development is the most core ideology of our country, in fact, development is also the most effective contraceptive. As gary Becker, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote in his essay "The Impact of China's One-Child Policy on Abandoning The Only Child": "China's one-child policy, although this policy successfully achieved the goal of significantly reducing the fertility rate, did not take into account the role of the 1978 reform and opening up in reducing the fertility rate." From this point of view, this policy is completely redundant and has far more disadvantages than contribution. ”
The great reform and opening up abandoned the plan of things, but implemented the plan of man. But "the implementation of the current fertility policy, on the whole, is only negative compared to the 'late scarcity' policy." The current birth policy is a policy that exposes the Chinese nation to a variety of risks and dilemmas, and should be adjusted in a timely manner. We are very pleased to see that within five or six years after the publication of this book, the state has successively introduced the "two-child policy" and the "three-child policy", which is undoubtedly a correction of great significance. The drawbacks of the "one-child policy" for many years are too great, and I am afraid that the effect of correcting deviations will not be revealed until many years later.
The author is undoubtedly a demographer with a historical responsibility and a moral conscience, who dares to make contrarian advice, even if it is not necessarily entirely correct, we should applaud such courage and boldness. Because in normal society, we should not only hear one voice, and the confrontation of multiple views can collide with the correct theory. As the author puts it, "Criticism makes people progressive, and this truth is undoubtedly universally applicable." Whether it is for a political party, a country, or a nation, criticism is an important driving force for progress. Whatever the motivation for this criticism. We cannot only allow self-criticism and criticism by our own people, but not the criticism of others, and an open and inclusive society should have such a broad mind and grace. ”
"Young Triumph": the courage to face the abyss
Among Chinese film directors, I have always believed that Jia Zhangke's storytelling ability and writing ability are the best, especially the two "Jia Xiang", whose writing is exquisite, the expression is refined, the judgment is sharp, and the thinking is mature, which is breathtaking. However, after watching Chen Kaige's "Young Kaige", I did not hesitate to revise my views, at least in my opinion, Chen Kaige's writing skills and ideological connotations are definitely not under Jia Zhangke.
Reflection has always been a rare and noble quality, and I admire the author's honesty and courage to record history through words and reflect on the times through memories after the raging tide of the times. And many more authors, with an extremely conscious sense of historical responsibility, have established a "text museum" for the fading history, which is for people to hang on and also to be thought-provoking. This is a precious treasure of a nation that we should cherish, not ignore.
Never go back to that era!
Empire Games: Being and Nothingness
Over the course of two weekend days, I finished reading Bolaño's Empire Games in one sitting. This is a Medusa-esque novel, with a charming charm and at the same time a dangerous demagogic power, and looking directly at it will certainly not be petrified, but will be attracted by the magic that emanates from the lines, as if it were the song of a Siren, unconsciously captured.
Udo Berger and his girlfriend Inge go on vacation to a Spanish seaside town, where they meet a group of friends who are funny or grotesque – Charlie, Hannah, Wolf Wolf, Lamberdero, Scardo... But things gradually develop in a bizarre direction, Charlie disappears, and he loses his good wargame game to the beginner Scardo.
The novel is always shrouded in a mysterious atmosphere, like the nightmare of Udo Berger, in the interlacing of virtual and real, filled with too many strange and absurd events, everything runs on a mysterious track, running in a surreal direction.
Reading this novel reminds me of Sartre's Existence and Nothingness, where man is a fragmented being, and Bolaño fictionalizes the whole of time and space, and the characters glide in the virtual world, unrestrained, and absurd.
I love this novel, even if it is illogical, but it has a strange charm; even if it has no thrilling plot, it is full of pleasant fun. Bolaño's writing is light and ethereal, free and romantic, and the story constructed by the text is very strange, and the two not only do not have a disagreement, but achieve subtle harmony and mix up just the right creation.
And this is only the author's original work, which has shown amazing creativity, and it has to be said that Bolaño is really a genius writer who plays with words.
The Republic of Light: All The Bright Places
Human society has long entered the "adult society", but in many conflicts, it has burst out of the old image, such as the shadow of war, environmental problems, and rights crises. In Lao Tzu's view, infant society should be the ideal form of human society, and in the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu has a specific exposition of infant philosophy, "Dedication and softness, can babies care?" (Chapter 10), "The crowd is bustling, like enjoying the prison, like spring on stage." I am alone, and I am not foreboding; I am chaotic, like a baby, and I am a fool, and I have nothing to go. (Chapter 20), "The saints are under the heavens, and the hearts of the people are in the world, and the people are attentive to their eyes and ears, and the saints are children" (chapter 49), "The thickness of virtue is greater than that of the naked child" (chapter 55). The novel "Republic of Light" is a sobering fable about human society, and the author Andrés Barva shows us the squeezing, persecution and destruction of the adult world on the childhood world in a magical realist narrative. The tone of the novel is heavy and cold, the style is wet and viscous, but the content is extremely charming, as if it is the vast forest on the outskirts of San Cristobal, hiding unknown landscapes and even wonderful dangers.
The book says, "Childhood is stronger than fiction." The thirty-two children of San Cristobal were hunted down by adult society and had to be transferred to the city's sewers. In the spacious and open underground space, they have built an ideal country for themselves - the Republic of Light.
This utopia from the perspective of children is the new order and new world created by the thirty-two children in order to escape the rules and institutions of the adult world and to establish for themselves. But the adult world is always watching your "big brother", who does not allow the rules they are accustomed to be offended, and the well-functioning institutions that are not allowed to be transgressed. As a result, the municipal government, the police station and the social affairs bureau launched a search for children's society by adult society in the name of restoring social order, rather than encircling and hunting.
Faced with the plunder and aggression of the adult world, "discipline and punishment", children who refuse to be recruited flee from the city, disappear from the forest, and move from the ground to the underground. When the adult world's sphere of influence also followed, the incomprehension of the strong to the weak led to the "birth of tragedy"—the drowning of thirty-two children. As the author soberly points out, the dead betrayed us in the form of abandonment, and we betrayed them in order to survive.
"Years after the death of those thirty-two children, I read about a biological experiment in which six flies and six bees were placed in a long-necked glass bottle, placed horizontally, with the bottom of the bottle facing the window, to see who escaped first: the flies escaped in the opposite direction from the window, but the bees crashed into the bottom of the bottle again and again, and eventually crashed to death, and they could not believe that the exit was not in a brightly lit place." Paul Gauguin said, "There are two things in me that cannot be ridiculed: wildness and innocence. "I think the reason why a person can always maintain his wildness and innocence is because he has been chasing the sun, chasing the bright light.
Little Hands: Runaway emotions
Andrés Barva's novels, not a record of reality, create entirely new realities, such as The Republic of Light, where people are busy hunting down a few wandering children on the morning of the failure of the world; such as Little Hands, which precisely defines everything in the pen, making the world understandable and deepening the chaos.
"Little Hands" includes five novels: "Little Hands", "Blood", "Consumption", "Nocturne", and "Marathon". All five novels have the shadow of dark novels, "Little Hands" tells the story of a beautiful little girl who is torn apart by a group of children in an orphanage, "Blood" tells about an irreconcilable family crisis, "Consumption" tells the difficult journey of an anorexia adolescent girl who self-harms and self-destructs, "Nocturne" tells the story of a 56-year-old man who falls in love with a 21-year-old boy but is insecure and self-loathing, and "Marathon" tells the story of a man who loves running in a marital crisis that can be broken.
The five novels, including family, love, and friendship, are also a mixture of chaos, confusion, and brokenness. In essence, the novel is a deep involvement in social relations, presenting a sense of alienation between people and revealing a sense of suspension between life and life. Your loneliness, my predicament, his (her) despair, walking through love and death, through blood and honey, finally disappeared in a dark corner, the wind can not enter the light can not hit.
This is an existential crisis of modern people on the verge of collapse, the established rules are invalid in the invisible and powerful giant network, the mode of life that follows is facing a crisis that breaks out of control, and people's mental state gradually slides to the edge of abnormality. As a last resort, they use loneliness to resist fragmented life, and use fear to dissolve insoluble emotions. As a last resort, isolate intimacy with indifference and create a solid cocoon city.
Thus, as the Marathon put it, "Running is the purest, the most absurd, and the only option." ”
History of the Founding of the Communist Party of China: Constructing History in Real History
2021 is the centenary of the birth of the Communist Party of China, and it is naturally necessary to study the history of the Party. The study and education of party history is not only to look back, to learn from the century-old suffering and glorious course, to have a comprehensive and systematic understanding of the party's history, not to "peep at the leopard in the middle of the tube," and still less to "touch the elephant by the blind man."; at the same time, it is also a matter of forging ahead and keeping firmly in mind the purpose of "throwing away the head and spilling the blood" of the benevolent people of those eras, so as to build our country more prudently and calmly, and resolutely not to go back to the road.
Domestic works on the study of party history can be described as full of sweat and cattle, but we have to admit that it is not only a matter of uneven good and bad, but also the inferiority of the many and the inferior, and there is a great tendency of "bad money expelling good money". "History of the Founding of the Communist Party of China" was written by Professor Ishikawa Akihiro of Kyoto University in Japan, which studies the history of the founding of the Communist Party of China from the perspective of a foreign scholar, with a detached and neutral stance and an objective and calm attitude, which is a natural advantage that the domestic Institute of Party History does not have.
This book liberates the history of the founding of the Communist Party of China from the study of the history of a country in China, presents a broader perspective on the overall historical view, and examines it in the overall historical context of Japan, Europe and the United States (especially Soviet Russia), and the international communist movement. For, as the author puts it, "What is originally the only historical fact has its own different formulations depending on the position and environment in which the observer finds itself." "A more neutral stance, a broader vision, and a more comprehensive presentation will undoubtedly help to restore the historical truth and discover the subtle and tortuous facts in the depths of history."
Of course, facts can be divided into objective facts and subjective facts, and history can be divided into real history and constructive history. Even if it is objective and neutral, serious and rigorous, the views in the "History of the Founding of the Communist Party of China" are still one family's words after all, and may not be completely accurate, and it is enough to use them as a reference for the study of party history. "The other is always the other of the self", the most precious quality that the reader should have is independent thinking and the spirit of inquiry.
"Revolutionizing the Past and The New: Law and Politics in the Early Republic of China": Penetration: A Political History of Beiyang
Croce said that all history is contemporary history. The so-called other is always the self-other, and historical research is inevitably permeated with the subjective cognition of the scholar himself. But reading history is still important, and the process of reading history is not only a mirror and examination of the past, but also a perception and recognition of the present and the self.
China's modern history began with the Opium War, and the Western cannons forced the mighty Heavenly Dynasty to be involved in the world competition order. As two important components of modern history: the history of the late Qing Dynasty and the history of the Republic of China, the research works on these two periods of history can be described as sweaty, but the first half of the history of the Republic of China, especially the political history, the "Weimar Republic" in the political context of our country, is obviously not enough research, and seems to have become an "absentee" who was selectively ignored.
Scholars such as Yang Kuisong, Wang Chaoguang, Wang Qisheng, Deng Ye and other scholars in the study of the history of the Republic of China basically focused on the period of the National Government, and most of them focused on the history of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. Professor Yang Tianhong's "Revolution of the Past and the New: Law and Politics in the Republic of China Period" can be described as a classic work in the study of Beiyang political history. In the author's view, the previous study of Beiyang history was mostly economic history, intellectual history, and cultural history, and did not pay enough attention to political history. Grasping the "main contradiction" of political history can overcome the problem of "fragmentation" of new historiography and play a role in the program.
In this book, the author, with his rigorous academic attitude and strict academic pursuit, combines the characteristics of Ranke historiography and the methods of the Annals School, pays attention to the overall view of history, examines political, economic, social, and cultural ideas in an all-round way, and at the same time pays great attention to historical documents, specific and subtle, and pursues the objective truth of history.
For me, many of the author's ideas have enlightened me and penetrated the fog barriers of history to carry out a systematic "disenchantment" of past myths. For example, I have read Zhang Yongle's "Old State and New Creation" before, which mentions in the book the legitimacy inheritance of the Qing Emperor's abdication edict on the succession of sovereignty of the Republic of China and the change of the political system; such as the cao kun bribery mentioned in the middle school textbook, the answer may not be so simple, there may be another truth; such as Zhang Taiyan's "revolutionary army rises, the revolutionary party disappears" and Zhang Shizhao's "destroy the party and build the party" on the reorganization of the alliance; such as Sun Yat-sen's huge turn from imitating the European and American political system to falling into the Soviet system. and a profound influence on the Nationalist government in Nanjing.
In my opinion, this is a good book that is grossly underrated and should be re-evaluated over time. In the final essay, the author emphasizes the systematic lack of the current situation of modern Chinese history research, but this book obviously has this problem, after all, this is the author's previous compilation of papers, and the logical system between the chapters is not close. In short, I hope to see the author write a perfect book that meets his systematic requirements in the future.