The picture comes from the Internet, invaded and deleted
Behind the hut where my father lived, along the wall, there was a large patch of thorny nettle. Chuande always avoids it when mowing the grass, for fear of being hurt. But the father was uprooted, and there was no expression of pain on his face. He said:
"Whether it hurts or not, we can decide for ourselves."
It was July 1948, and the 15-year-old Chuande came from the city to a farm in the forest to spend the summer with his father, who worked there.
It was this summer that made Chuande remember for a lifetime. The pain of life, all derived from this summer, determines the tone of the rest of the life.
This is the story that the book "Out and Steal a Horse" tells us. As a father and son, a friend, and a symbolic competitor, Chuande and his father interpret love and pain.
The book was named One of the Top Ten Novels of the Year by Time, Top Ten Books of the Year by The New York Times, and was made into a movie. The author is Pelle Patterson, a master of contemporary Norwegian literature. With this novel, he won almost all literary awards in Europe and the United States.
Patterson's novels are full of Nordic coldness and silence, and his characters are mostly taken from ordinary small people, and the themes are mostly around the loneliness of people, or the departure of fathers and sons, brotherhood and young friendships. The Norwegian rite of Lonely Planet introduces only three writers, except for two Nobel Laureates in Literature, Pelle Patterson.
"Going Out to Steal a Horse" mainly tells the story of Chuande and his father and several ordinary people in the village. The story is set during World War II, where there are German garrisons in Norway, and his father is an underground party that helped the Norwegian Resistance Army secretly pass documents to Sweden.
Why is it almost a lifetime of virtue in a summer? Let's take a look at this story and feel the grief of a 15-year-old teenager who experienced the loss of a playmate, the beginning of his love sinus and the betrayal of his father in one summer.
● Loss of playmate
By early July 1948, the Germans had been withdrawing for three years. From Oslo, Norway, he came to this village, just a few kilometers from the Swedish border. There was a little boy in the village who was the same age as him, named Jon. Jon has two 10-year-old twin brothers, one named Lars and the other named Oder.
Jon likes to play with Hime, shooting hares, fishing for trout, and practicing balance on logs in the river. One morning, he came to find Chuande to go to Baca's farm to steal horses, to be precise, to steal horses.
It sounds exciting, and they play like crazy. After Chuande fell off his horse, they went to pick up the bird's egg. Hearing rumors that eggs can turn into birds and can fly, Jon suddenly has a series of very strange moves. He let go of his hand and let the bird's egg fall out of his hand, and also pulled off the nest and twisted it between his fingers into powder. Chuande was too frightened to speak, nor did he dare to disturb him.
His father told Chuande what he had heard about Yoon in the shop. It turned out that the day before the horse theft, Jon's brother Lars had mistakenly killed Oder with the gun that Jon had just shot at the hare.
Forgetting for a moment that his parents were not at home and were responsible for taking care of his two younger brothers, Jon went out to hunt hares. When he came home with the booty and did not see his brother, he remembered it, so anxious that he ran outside to find the bullets without taking them out. The two younger brothers were playing in the basement when they came up and saw Jon's gun against the wall. Lars picked up the gun, and the hero brother Jon pulled the trigger, and the bullet hit Oder's heart at close range.
Oder's funeral made Chuande remember 3 things. The first is that the father and Joen's father did not look at each other, and only said "mourning and changing"; the second is that Lars suddenly ran wildly after his brother's small coffin was sent to the tomb, and kept running in the cemetery, and then was hugged by the neighbor, but he could not make a sound. Jon didn't say a word either, just looked straight at Tude. The third is that Chuande feels sad that it is no longer possible to steal horses.
"Losing your life is like holding an egg in your hand, and as soon as your hand is loose, the egg falls to the ground and shatters, and from then on it is nothing." If you're dead, you're dead, but in the blink of an eye, whether you realize what it feels like or not, it's over. ”
●The emotional sinus is initially opened
After Oder's funeral, Jon ran away from home. From then on, Tude never saw Jon again.
Chuande and his father helped Baka fork the hay. Seeing Yoon's mother, Chuande suddenly had a vague idea, close to the adult's thoughts. He also noticed the strangeness between his father and Joen's mother.
When cutting the spruce, there was Joan's mother, Ande and his father worked particularly hard, and Chuande also felt that he had divine power, especially wanted to perform, and was particularly diligent.
However, the accident came. Father Jon seemed to know what Father Chuande had for his wife, so all the people who worked there listened to Father Chuande, but Father Jon, who always challenged the authority of Father Chuande. As Mother Jon looked at the two men who were standing on a pile of logs and secretly competing, Dzogchen made an intimate gesture to Mother Jon—wrapping her arms around her shoulders.
This action caused two men who were stacking wood to lose their hands, and the wood fell out of control to Joen's father, his leg broken, and his shoulder fell heavily.
For the first time, Chuande flashed a trace of hatred for his father, and this hatred came to the brink of rage, believing that his father had ruined the most perfect moment of his life so far. He was so immersed in his emotions that his whole being was about to explode, and he couldn't even remember whether he had felt sorry for Joen's father.
And Father Jon cried bitterly in his wife's arms, perhaps because of his wounds; perhaps because one of his sons died, and the other ran away from home, probably never to return; perhaps because he felt and saw the subtlety between his wife and the father and son. In short, life seems to be hopeless.
For Chuande, from this moment on, everything is not the way it was. He decided to hide the pain in his body and not let it appear on his face.
● Father betrayal
Chuande actually loves his father very much and admires him. Father and son are deeply like friends, and the father calls Chuande the boss.
In Chuande's mind, no matter what his father did, he was very confident and believed that he would succeed.
My father loved architecture, motors, and machinery. His work is uncertain, sometimes he travels away from home, busy and idle, not the kind of work that receives a salary. When Chuande was 7 years old, German fighters entered Norway, and soon after, my father went out for the first time.
On the night that Joen's father was injured and taken to the hospital, Joen's mother did not go to the hospital to take care of Lars, and his father did not sleep at home. The next morning, when Dōdha got up, on the other side of the river, witnessed her father and Mother Jon sitting in chairs, crying.
This summer of 1948, so much happened. Trado also learns about his father's work from his secret comrade-in-arms, Franz, who has developed a relationship with Johan's mother in underground work.
When Chuande is controlled by the idea of falling in love with Joen's mother, he sees his father as a rival. He secretly competed with his father as he cut down trees; when he saw his father and Mother Jon sitting together, he would huddle between them and talk loudly.
Witnessing his father's betrayal, as a son, he tried to think of his mother, but he could not see her. The mother disappeared, completely out of touch with all this.
Passing on virtue is painful. Since learning his father's story, Chuande has seen his father differently, and he does not know whether he is more kind or more strange.
But he could put it all aside when he was alone with his father, and they were still good friends. Together with his father, he managed to find a way to cut down the logs and thrown into the river down the river to Sweden.
As an adult, my father actually knows how to pass on virtue. On the road of growing up, he was also a teacher and a friend, often seeing through but not saying broken. The Father's love is like a mountain, and he gives chuande a lot of respect.
In the face of the little man's ignorant feelings, he admits his feelings for Jon's mother, and also admits that he has done wrong.
When Chuande fell off his horse, he would say, "If it hurts in your heart, just let it go, don't put it on your heart, it won't be good for you." ”
When Chuande did not dare to cut the nettle with a sickle, he would silently demonstrate and directly uproot it with his hands. He said, "It's up to you to decide whether it hurts or not." ”
After the summer of 1948, his father sent Chuande home. His father told him that this summer was amazing and told him that this was life.
"You can learn a lot from the various things that happen, especially at your age, you have to accept whatever you want, and then remember to think about it, don't forget it, and don't resent it."
● Lonely pension
Now, in early November 1999, Chuande is 67 years old. The second wife died in a car accident 3 years ago, and her sister, who was good friends with her, also died of cancer. Two relatives died in a row within a month, and he had always lost interest in talking to people. He didn't want to work anymore, so he retired and found a new place to live— a small village in eastern Norway, in a forest he had always wanted to be close to.
Now he lives alone and has a dog named Lyra. Most of his own things, he didn't want to ask someone to do. He wants to do what he wants and can do in the time he can use. The housework is done slowly, and the room is slowly cleaned up.
Although he enjoys his current life, he also feels that he is old. For example, the news is broadcast 24/7 every day, but he sometimes feels that the news has no meaning to him and can no longer change his view of the world.
Here, he accidentally meets his childhood friend Lars. Lars also lives alone and has a dog.
Since they were neighbors, it was impossible to pretend not to know each other, even though Rals did not want Lars to recognize him. When they "had to" recognize each other, the two "reluctantly" returned to that summer.
Lars told Lynd that his dad hadn't been home since he was injured in 1948 and that he had been running the farm. Later, when 24-year-old Yone suddenly came home and said he was going to take over the farm, people looked sick like addicts. Because his mother did not say anything about Jon's sudden return to take over the farm, at the age of 20, Lars left the farm and never went back, and he never knew about his mother.
● Whether it hurts or not, we can decide for ourselves
What kind of person is Chuande? When he was 7 years old, he and his sister were swimming in the river, not feeling happy, but feeling that they should do something that they should redouble their efforts, something that made them miserable.
That summer, which he remembered for the rest of his life, his pain came from his childhood playmates, his father, and Joen's mother. At the age of 15, he was almost silent and suffered in silence. In this way, he protected himself and let his pain not widen.
Toward the end of the fall of 1948, my father wrote to him that he would not return home. Chuande and his mother go to the Swedish bank to get the money their father has stored there. When asked for directions, Chuande was enraged and almost hit someone. At the last moment, he lowered his fist. He knew that if he really fought, he would have a different life. He chose to decide his own life.
When he grew up, Chuande still believed that life was shaped by himself, and he believed that whether it was worth it or not, he was fully responsible.
At the age of 67, the idea of wanting to rely on yourself in everything has not changed. Chuande thought he had the ability to be alone, and felt that there was nothing to be afraid of, because he had always been a child in gold pants, and as long as he put his hand in his pocket, he had an inexhaustible amount of shiny gold coins.
He knew that others were curious about the old man who lived alone, and he would gently tell others some of his stories, but it didn't matter what others thought of him. He was polite and smiling so as not to let others have extreme thoughts about him and not to give others a chance to touch him.
It wasn't until Lars reappeared in his life, and his daughter tried her best to find his place to stay, that he realized that he had changed. The birch trees in the yard were crushed by the snow, and Lars helped Chuande deal with it, and the two worked together happily. Lars's attitude was contagious, and Chuande found that he was willing to rely on others. When his daughter asked him if he didn't want her to come to see him, he actually told her daughter not to leave, and considered accepting her daughter's suggestion to install a phone.
Chuande has always loved to read Dickens's books, and the protagonists in the books have taken their fate into their own hands and not let others dominate. Therefore, all along, he learned to bury his pain in his heart, not to tell anyone, and to lick his wounds silently. Even in his old age, he didn't want to change anything, he just wanted to be alone, not disturbed, and when he wanted, he could also go to the bustle, which was his plan. He believes that as long as he wants, he can come out of the past story, and everything is up to him.
Each of our lives is full of mixed tastes, how do we deal with the encounters in life? Is it not to let the storm come more fiercely, or to be like a moral, to be buried in the dark and secretly to be your own hero?
Different choices will bring different results. But if we believe that everything is the best arrangement, all people and things, are to achieve themselves, then, when the heavy blow strikes, we can maintain a positive and optimistic mood, and like chuande, take the initiative in our own hands, pain or not, and decide for ourselves. Life has a heavy blow, there will be a gift, let us be brave to be a master who determines the direction of our own life.