Reading, find a real destination for life

Almost all of my father's intellectual and skilled education was completed after joining the army, and before that, he had no formal schooling. But I will not forget the ordinary but calm figure of my father in the face of complex circuit and equipment problems. Although the mother has completed the junior high school education, as a "post-50s" in an ordinary family, it is inevitable to encounter the difficulties and obstacles of the times, and it is difficult to say how systematic and complete the mother's school education is. But I will never forget my mother's intoxication when she read a novel. The bumpy life made my father firmly believe in "learning mathematics, physics and chemistry well, and walking all over the world is not afraid", and ordinary daily life made my mother adhere to "plain and simple is true", one is so rational, one is so emotional. And I don't seem to be much influenced by my father's "urgent use first, urgent learning first use", but more inspired by my mother's "no desire, no demand, calm and calm" state of mind. From the time I remember reading as a child, I seemed to be filled with an inexplicable affinity for literature and art.

Poetry used to warm my childhood

As a "post-70s", my childhood coincided with the "1980s" that belonged to poetry. The earliest thing that can be traced in the depths of my memory to this day is a poetry journal called "Stars". The psalms in the poetry journal are vague impressions, but the real feeling of the first encounter with beautiful poetry has always been hidden in my spiritual world. Like many contemporaries, we had childhood relationships with poetry, and when I was still ignorant of the whole world of words, I had a wonderful verse next to my ear: "Spring sleep is not aware, everywhere you smell birds." A few years later, when I came into contact with ancient poetry again and got to know Li Bai, Meng Haoran, Luo Binwang, Su Dongpo and other poets again, the sense of intimacy that flowed from the bottom of my heart surprised me, it was a deep feeling and quiet germination of childhood memories, and finally manifested as an emotion, which came from an incomplete but real reading era.

In the unique atmosphere of the 1980s, the uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters around them coincided with "youth", the "obscure poems" they admired and recited, and those familiar poets: Xi Murong, Wang Guozhen, Whitman, Pushkin... For me, an ignorant child, there is a lingering charm. I believe that my poetic reverie and vision of the world comes from childhood poetry reading. Reading at this stage may not be enough to read in the true sense, and I cannot grasp the depth and clarity of these classical poems, the sadness and frankness of modern poetry, but it is indeed the most pious and deep-rooted reading experience, which is enough to affect a person's life.

After becoming a father, I happened to read "Poems for Children" selected by the poet Kitajima, and the beauty of childhood encounters with poetry could not help but hit my heart. This "Poems for Children" is a selection of poetry masterpieces, and it is also a special "childhood reading" for children, I often read these poems to children, and every time I read them, it is as if I have traveled through time and space, and once again found the once simple and flawless imagination in the poems.

Stories are also simple and great education

My first understanding of the world around me came from fairy tales, and it was Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Zheng Yuanjie who opened the floodgates of my imagination and wiped away the helpless confusion in the eyes of young people. "Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales", "Grimm's Fairy Tales", "Zheng Yuanjie's Fairy Tales", and "One Thousand and One Nights" almost constitute the eternal story picture of my recall of my youth. The feeling of reading fairy tales is always engraved in the heart, it is a bright light, illuminating the world and reflecting the truth, goodness and beauty of the world.

After middle school, I was a bit "not doing my job" and began to like to read martial arts novels. Some people say that martial arts novels are "fairy tales for adults". When I became an adult, I no longer liked to read martial arts novels. Nowadays, I often think that martial arts novels are actually an important bridge to help me move from fairy tales to literary reading. For me, the study of basic knowledge of literature such as history, characters, plot, structure, emotion, psychology, language, style, and rhetoric began with the reading process of martial arts novels. From Gu Long's works, what I read was the multidimensionality of human nature's good and evil and emotion; from Jin Yong, I began to further taste the grace and elegance of the Chinese language. Fiction stories are fictional, but emotions are real, and real emotions will always be remembered.

Nowadays, all walks of life emphasize the charm of "stories" and the ability to "tell stories". "Story" is indeed a kind of "silent" way of education and dissemination. In 2013, when the production of Internet courses began to gradually enter the university campus, I immediately had an impulse to present the professional course "History of Chinese Cinema" that I had taught in the classroom for many years to more people through the Internet in another "story" way. As a result, my "Chinese Film History" course was completed, which was awarded the "National Excellent Video Open Course" by the Ministry of Education in 2015, and has been clicked by more than hundreds of thousands of times on the "NetEase Open Class" so far. The inheritance of history is always inseparable from the story, although there seems to be a contradiction between the documentary and the fiction between the story and the history, but the other side of this contradiction shows that the important thing may not be what history says, but how history can be told.

Since I was a child, I have loved to read historical books. In 1990, when I was 13 years old, in the small shop of Huadao Park on Lushan Mountain that year, in the face of a variety of tourist goods, I chose a book alone, that is, "Lushan History" that laid an important foundation for my future understanding of the historical evolution and cultural charm of Lushan. The historical stories written by Mr. Luan Shu this week have been reprinted, and the version I still have on the shelf is still from the 1980s, and the title page of the book still has my clumsy signature when I was 13 years old, and it has turned yellow, but every time I read this book, the outlines on it can bear witness to my love for this book.

Literature has prepared me for a lifetime's career

After going to college, I always thought that college could not simply become a "vocational training course". I started looking around campus. At this time, the word "humanistic" felt very kind when I first met, and because of this, I began to have a hazy "literati complex". As a result, my reading naturally transitioned to the stage of "reading literati". I remember that the first biography I read was "The Biography of Chen Duxiu". This book is interesting because Chen Duxiu is a unique character who wanders in the dual roles of politics and literati. Since then, a number of outstanding figures in the May Fourth New Culture Movement have entered my field of vision, and I often read a lot of biographies about these "new figures of the old era". One by one, vivid characters, with their pride and talent, their sensitive hearts, their love for the world, painted an outstanding "humanistic atmosphere" in front of my eyes.

Most of the modern Chinese literati I met through reading have learned from ancient and modern times, both Chinese and foreign, and they have made me realize that literature, history and philosophy are not separated. So, for quite some time I read a lot of books on history and philosophy. I dream of being able to "read through" like Qian Zhongshu "swept through the Tsinghua Library". However, I soon found that my reading seemed to have encountered a blank space, as if I had read a lot of books, but not much precipitation into the depths of my heart. For this reason, I have also been troubled. What pushes you out of the wandering is a determination. I am determined to apply for graduate school in modern and contemporary Chinese literature and return to campus to relive my old dreams. I chose "pure literature" and thus began a new era of reading that was destined to have a profound impact on my life.

Stepping into the palace of art carefully constructed by various literary texts, I realized that the original poetic perception was so wonderful and lasting. But the teacher often said that it is impossible to study literature without reading literary theory, because "theory is the grammar of research." The starting point of my literary reading is Mr. Zong Baihua's "Aesthetic Walk". Go for a walk with aesthetics and feel the aesthetics with a walking state of mind. This book gave me an intuitive feeling and spiritual epiphany of the literary and artistic works themselves in the initial stages of relatively boring literary criticism and research. When I grew up as a teacher, I often recommended "Aesthetic Walk" to all students in the introductory stage of art theory, and teachers and students felt the excitement and beauty of "using poetry to prove poetry" and "expressing art in the language of art".

Reading made me who I wanted to be

Since graduating with his Ph.D., he has been teaching at the university for 15 years. The beauty of the university lies in the calm and unhurried arrogance. Outsiders are envious of the poor teaching craftsman life, but I am afraid that it is mostly for the cold and summer holidays. Don't you know that for teachers, winter and summer vacations are not only rest, but also a kind of self-adjustment and improvement. For university teachers, in addition to preparing lessons, there are certain scientific research tasks, and there must be a certain amount of time for meditation, otherwise why calmly?

Therefore, the current reading life is often mainly concentrated in the winter and summer vacations. Although I am accompanied by students every day, I always feel afraid in my heart, and I am a teacher with deep responsibility. However, ask yourself, the reading life of a year is often because of a certain paper or a certain topic, reading for the so-called "research", limited to the layout of the professional field, looking for chapters and excerpts. This kind of reading is really "must read".

However, often when reading a book must be "must read", it seems that the pattern is too small and the temperament is too small. Therefore, I tried to read some "idle books" in addition to "must read". For example, the popular best-selling book "A Brief History of Mankind", this book I was very resistant, felt that it seemed to be far away from my profession, but in fact I found that the reading of this "Brief History" is not obscure, on the contrary, it has a strong inspiration and deconstruction, inspired me to reflect on the "evolutionary view" of human society from the perspective of traditional cognition in the past, and also deconstructed many unchallengable "conceptual forms" that we think are "common sense". For example, the most important type in my "Idle Book" reading series is history books, I like history, from Huang Renyu's "Fifteen Years of Wanli", to Shi Jingqian's "Taiping Heavenly Kingdom", and Kong Feili's "Calling the Soul: The Great Panic of Chinese Witchcraft in 1768", all of which are my "favorites", Chinese history under the western perspective, showing another "familiar and unfamiliar" face, which is of great reference significance.

Nowadays, I often feel that "mobile phones can't see it", but I often warn myself that information cannot replace reading, and fragments cannot replace depth. In the writer Lu Yao's masterpiece "Ordinary World", the younger brother "Sun Shaoping", who loves to learn but has a poor family, becomes a miner in order to live, and every time after work, he has to clean his black face, eat a mouthful of food, and secretly take out the expired newspapers and periodicals carefully preserved in the middle of the night. Sun Shaoping said, "This is my daily spiritual meal." When I was in college, I was moved to tears by this scene in the novel, so now I often ask myself, "What is your spiritual meal today?"

To be a teacher, to read and be a man. Reading is teaching, and being a preacher is human. Nowadays, I have brought a lot of master's students and have begun to train my own doctoral students, which makes me feel even more inseparable from reading and being a person. After each graduate school admission, I will recommend to them a book "Five Years of Shimen", which is the 5 years of interaction with Hu Shi with Mr. Luo Ergang, an expert in history. I often think that this book is also a very small and large book that teaches me "how to train graduate students" and "how teachers and students get along and how to live with themselves". The daily bits and pieces in this book can't help but remind me of Mr. Wang Yuanhua's words that "I don't do flattering words for learning".

I remember a class for students, talking about the appreciation of Chinese painting and calligraphy art, projecting out the Song Dynasty painter Fan Kuan's famous work "Xishan Travel Map", the classroom curtains are light, the lamps are all closed, and only one projection is reflected on the white curtain. In close contact with the master's work in the dark, all words at this moment are irrelevant, the northern mountains between the square inches are light and thick under the painter's pen, it seems to be towering over the clouds, and it is close at hand, and at the foot of the mountain is a group of merchant travelers walking between the mountains and rivers. We all seem to have inadvertently passed by the edge of this landscape depicted by the master, and once you walk in, you are finding an inexplicable answer to life. I think that the great wisdom of reading may be to find a real destination for life.

(Shen Lu, Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, Nanchang University, Doctoral Supervisor.) Nanchang University "Top Ten Teaching Pacesetters")

Ten book lists:

"Poems for Children"

Kitajima Selected Edition

Chushin Publishing Co., Ltd. 2014 Edition

One Thousand and One Nights

Anon

Translated by Wang Ruiqin

People's Literature Publishing House, 2018 edition

Legend of the Archery Hero

Jin Yong

Guangzhou Publishing House 2020 edition

"History of Lushan"

Written by Zhou Luanshu

Jiangxi People's Publishing House, 2005

The Biography of Chen Duxiu

Chen Liming

Unity Press, 2000

Aesthetic Walk

Written by Zong Baihua

Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2020 edition

A Brief History of Mankind

[Israel] by Yuval Harari

Chushin Publishing 2017 Edition

Fifteen Years of Wanli

By Huang Renyu

Life, Reading, and New Knowledge Triptych Bookstore, 1997 edition

The Ordinary World

The road is far away

Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House

2017 edition

"Five Years of Shimen"

Written by Rohr Gang

Life, Reading, and New Knowledge Triptych Bookstore 2012 Edition

China Teachers Daily, October 27, 2021, 8th edition

Author:Shen Lu