Author Xiao Shen
It is an emotion without any prejudices. It can breed in the slums of the four walls of the family, and it can commit itself to the golden castle. It does not know when it has quietly sneaked into everyone's heart, like a seed full of sunshine and dew, and began to take root.
Hello, sorrow.
The protagonist of the book, Cecil, is a romantic by nature and pursues extreme freedom. Much of it depends on her father, Raymond, a forty-year-old man who changes his girlfriend every six months. They have very similar dispositions and go further and further down the road of "self-exile". In the words of the book, it can be summed up as follows: "I have forgotten the time of death, forgotten the brevity of life, and forgotten the beautiful feelings of the world." I thought about living a despicable and shameless life. This is my ideal,"
At the beginning of the story, Cecil, Raymond, and his mistress Elsa vacation in a villa on the Mediterranean seashore. Every day, they live unsupervised and free. Of course, all this was broken after Anna's arrival. As Raymond's best friend for fifteen years, Anna is a rare woman with a decent life and a very high degree of cultivation. For Anna, Cecil was both respectful and afraid. On the one hand, she envied Anna's grace and generosity, and on the other hand, she was afraid of the constraints on her by the standards of behavior that Anna brought. The calm of life lasted until the day the four of them went to the bar together. On that day, her father abandoned his lover Elsa; on that day, her father and Anna decided to marry...
When Cecil heard the news the next day, she was both a little proud that she was about to become an upscale person like Anna, and at the same time she felt lost. In the days that followed, however, Anna's rules and regulations consumed that part of her pride. She began to tire of this life and wanted to remove Anna from her future life. So there was a conspiracy she later devised with her boyfriend and her father's ex-girlfriend, which eventually led to Anna's exhaustion and a car accident and death.
Many people think that Cecil is a heinous bad girl, and at the age of eighteen, she has begun to use a series of psychological guides to design a performance against Anna, which led to Anna's death. I also think she's going too far in doing this, but I still have something to say. Cecil lived in the post-war period, a time of fragmentation, when civilizations and beliefs were in dire need of reconstruction. At that time, Cecil was only eighteen years old. Many of her habits are easily influenced by those around her, like the constant pursuit of excitement and pleasure under the influence of her father. And that's exactly why she rejects Anna. For a person who lives in a nightclub bar, it is natural to have a sense of distance for people who study step by step every day.
But Cecil is not just going with the flow, she is also a sober and calm bystander. She knew that the norms, stability, and harmony that Anna brought were innocent and superior to the life they were living now. As she said to herself:
"You're crazy! She's Anna, the smart Anna, the one who once took care of your life! Her calmness, her way of life, you cannot see any selfish calculations; her indifference protects her from the mud, which is the guarantee of self-purification.
When Cecil confronts Anna, she doubts her existing life, she is like a person who is about to wake up in a dream - she knows that the lights and drunken fans in the dream are only short-lived and cannot last, and she knows that there is a more stable life waiting for her in real life. So Cecil woke up again and swayed between her slumber. So what ultimately leads to tragedy can't all be attributed to Cecil's fault. She has a lot of helplessness in choosing to fall, just like at the end when Cecil found out that her ruse had been fulfilled and Anna was leaving with her car in a daze, she shouted:
"Anna, we need you."
It was in that instant that she realized that she had hurt a "flesh-and-blood, emotionally rich person, not a philosophical entity." She suddenly realized that what she hated was not Anna, but preaching; what she hated was not peace, but the feeling of being restrained. But it was too late.
So I don't think Cecil is a bad girl. She is a depraved person who is pushed forward by many small things, helpless. Perhaps most of us hate being bound by others or rules because we feel that our constrained selves cannot be called a complete self. But we may not have thought that society and money invisibly constrain our behavior, and even they make us go farther and farther on the road to becoming the people we hate! So in the face of a sudden change in life, don't rush to veto it, try to accept it?
But at the same time, there must be a need to maintain their own characteristics. Because only in this way is the "I" that really exists.
Finally, I bless everyone with a passage from the book, hoping that in the future we can all "think freely, think freely, think freely, freely choose my own life, choose myself." ”
(Some image source: 360 pictures)