Miscellaneous three
Wen | Li Jingze
A tea of history
The tropics are very hot, the sun is hanging vertically on the top, and the human head is inevitably groggy and wants to sleep. In Gauguin's paintings, Tahitian people, plants, and stones are either asleep, have just woken up, or are about to fall asleep. Gauguin was disgusted with modern civilization and traveled thousands of miles to find a place to sleep. Conversely, "civilization" means getting as little sleep as possible and getting as clear a mind as possible.
So, a Singapore politician believes that the invention of air conditioning has great historical significance, it allowed Singapore or Tahiti to have the same cool indoor environment as Paris or New York, so that people in the tropics can lift their spirits and spend more sleep time on work, thinking and creating.
- That's good. But I want to talk about tea, tea drinking is a great invention of the Chinese, it is said that the custom of drinking tea began to spread widely around 500 AD, that was the era of the Southern and Northern Dynasties; in the Tang Dynasty, Lu Yu wrote the "Tea Classic", which made the original cultural interpretation of tea drinking:
The taste is cold, and it is most suitable for drinking. People who practice frugality, if they are thirsty, congested, brain ache, astringent, limbs, and uncomfortable, talk about four or five sips.
Look at these symptoms: hot and thirsty, sullen heart and headache, tired and unable to open their eyes, in short, listless and sleepy, then you should drink tea.
Before inventing tea drinking, the more enterprising Chinese was very painful, "head overhanging beams, cone piercing bones", our ancestors and people to sleep this natural rhythm of hard struggle. Later, with tea, drinking several pots a day, everyone became a "frugal person", everyone was full of vitality, and they couldn't sleep if they wanted to, so they could do more things with more time and higher efficiency, such as approving official documents or weaving cloth, such as painting or writing poetry.
From the Southern and Northern Dynasties to the Sui and Tang Dynasties, it was a critical period in the history of Chinese civilization, religion, painting, calligraphy, poetry, all kinds of subtle spiritual forms such as flowers blooming, Chinese eyes seemed to suddenly light up, the heart was as sensitive as silk, and civilization changed from simple and rough to gorgeous and complex.
Why? Drink tea, of course. In addition to making people sleep less, tea also makes people's hearts bright, tea is refreshing, and the "god" of "mention" is "spirit".
Similarly, coffee was introduced to Europe in the early seventeenth century, and the so-called "enlightenment", "rationality", "modernity", the so-called "imperialism" and "colonialism" were probably stimulated by caffeine.
Tea not only enhances our spirit, I think it also greatly improves the gastrointestinal function of the whole nation, because tea can dissolve alcohol and help digestion. This was particularly important for the ancient northern nomads. The good men on the horse, drinking wine and eating meat every day, suffered from indigestion for thousands of years; finally, the farmers in the south discovered this magical leaf, which ate and silted up, making people smooth up and down, so that the horses on the grassland were faster, the knives were brighter, and Genghis Khan's army swept through the Southern Song Dynasty with appetizing milk tea, and whales swallowed most of the world.
But the farmers had a more shrewd calculation, and they conquered the world in another way. Under the storms and rains of history, tea has been steadily and continuously sucking silver into China. Since the Tang Dynasty, tea has been the basic material factor of our civilization, and it has monopolized the world market for a long time, like ceramics and silk. The nomads in the north want to drink tea, and later the British can't do without tea, so well, take the silver! At that time, we had many cattle, and we could maintain an absolute and long-term trade surplus with tea alone.
This arrogance was so arrogant that the Opium War still dragged a long shadow, when there were wise people who looked like torches, and at a glance saw the British people's color and inwardness: As long as we don't sell tea, those devils must not dry their stools and die alive?
This is a "bottom-up" strategy, but the problem is that the old gentlemen do not know that the British were already growing tea on a large scale in India at that time, and the first seedlings were brought to India from China by the British envoy Macartney.
This happened in 1794, when Macartney touched a nose of ash at the Qianlong Emperor of our holy Ming Dynasty and left Beijing to go south to Macau. Passing through Jiangsu and Zhejiang, he "got" a few high-quality tea seedlings — something that happened right under the noses of the officials accompanying the Heavenly Dynasty, who were happy to show condescending generosity to foreigners who had never seen the world.
But at that moment, the historical brilliance of tea quietly dissipated. Tea is no longer the glory of civilization, no longer a magical wealth, it is just tea, an everyday drink.
At this time, there is a lamp of old tea at hand, as a weapon against sleep and against the lack of spirit, I think it is not as good as coffee; if I eat it, the more effective way is to take gastric motility pills; as a careless drinker, I can drink China's Longjing, Oolong, Puer, Lipton black tea I also drink, of course, the day is going to be hot, the room must have air conditioning.
I loved the island
Wilkie Collins was the first Englishman I knew. In the early seventies of the last century, I read his "Moon Gems", the jewels in the Indian crown were scattered in England with curses, and whoever had the gems would suffer disaster. I can't remember the specific plot of the story, but I remember the three entangled Indians, who seemed to be playing with the flute and playing with snakes, who were the guardians of the gems, the messengers of fate, who followed the gems to the edge of the sky.
Now I will tell you that this story is an illustration of colonial psychology: their possessiveness of the "East", their fear of the "East", and the subconscious sense of guilt. But twenty years ago, in the Jewel of the Moon, I saw only "Britain," the distant, mysterious island.
Later, a person grew up, went to middle school, went to college, worked, and went through the eighties and nineties. Like my contemporaries, Chinese readers, I roamed the Eurasian continent from east to west: Akhmatova and Pasternak in the vast moscow, to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky's magnificent Petersburg; the winding streets of Prague, where Kafka and Kundera slipped like moles; Berlin, Vienna, the cities of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Freud; of course, all roads lead to Paris, with Rousseau in pajamas, Sartre, and Foucault the bald. Exhausted Rob Grillet and Margaret Duras... A large group of Frenchmen awaited us.
There are two roads to the West, one on land and one on the sea. For some mysterious reason, contemporary Chinese readers usually travel by international train from Beijing to Moscow. But there is another possibility, which is to go west from the sea, take a nineteenth-century ship, and finally see the island floating at sea level, the waves lapping at the desolate reef.
- That's the British Isles. On the map, it looks like a pendant hanging from the chest of Eurasia, and for hundreds of years it has been hesitant: whether to fall into the arms of the continent or to turn around and float alone into the vast ocean? It is proud, sophisticated, tenacious, it looks at the wind and clouds on the continent, the buildings are collapsing, and the bones are unmoving, like a gentleman's face, and the heart is hidden behind the gray eyes.
I like England, I like Holmes, his thin face, his black cloak, his cold, tough rationality; and Dickens, who I think is at least 1.5 times smarter than Balzac, who writes about a foggy London as the wonders of the human imagination; russell, the old and shameless Russell, who calmly explains the world; and the Beatles, angelic rock in student uniforms, and I think they are as crazy but elegant as Wilde. I even like the black square, the red square, which is heavier, and Burberry's raincoat and plaid scarf, which is natural and sophisticated, compared to Parisian fashion, which is like the head of a circus. Of course, I also like Vivien Leigh, Diana...
For me, the island is a silver-gray spiritual phenomenon, understated, luxurious, hard and solid. The British cultivated and developed the empirical tradition of thought, they believe that the madness of things that reason cannot solve can not be solved, the philosophers under this tradition are usually "not good-looking", they are conservative, calm, responsible, do not go straight to the "ultimate", do not think of philosophy and history as poetry, you can not imagine that there will be Heidegger or Rousseau in England, just as you cannot imagine that the British will smash everything and start all over again.
English literature has the same temperament. I've read all of Graham Green's Chinese translations, and I wonder why Chinese writers rarely mention him, I think he's one of the greatest novelists of modern times, and his sense of scale, his fine observation of human nature, his inner depth, and the balance of artistic gestures are all things that Chinese novelists lack.
But Green's next plate is too stable, too internal, and he was coldly treated in China, perhaps because he is not as volitious and flowery as his peers across the English Channel, he probably never thought about how to destroy the novel, he only wants to write the novel well.
A lot of people don't like British culture, but I do. If I had to be reasonable, I wish I were Russell; suppose I write fiction, I wish I were Green. I'd like to imagine that I had long ago boarded the ship and set out for that island, and that Wilkie Collins, the nineteenth-century third-rate novelist, this gloomy old fellow, was my captain.
Anti-Travelogue
I've always thought that writing travelogues is a boring and suspicious thing to do in this day and age. In this era, countless people are flying around, tourism has become a large-scale industry, gentlemen and ladies in cars have explored the backcountry, and video cameras and digital cameras have turned on every shame in the world. The life and cultural premises of "Travelogue" are almost no longer valid.
All "travelogues" are saying one thing: "I" am "on the spot". The travelogue writer holds a Caesarian attitude: I come, I see, I write.
And I want to add one: I doubt. I doubt my eyes and my mind, and I think that what we make a fuss about claiming to see and write is usually what we already have in our minds, and the so-called "scene", the so-called "scenery", is nothing but the situation born of the mind, it is a well-known play.
Trying to get through the illusion, to be alert to "me", to the "scene", to leave "polite" room between "me" and "scene", which is what I call "anti-travelogue", if I must write.
Life is like a reverse journey, this body is a guest, both a guest, it should be polite and courteous, travel notes are not polite style, just as the camera is an impolite machine, they do not believe that this mountain and river have their own inviolable privacy, they conceitedly take the scene as privacy - to paraphrase a popular adage, tourism is to watch "bright privacy", and writing travel notes and taking photos is thinking about each other, moving around. So, I don't write travelogues, I write "anti-travelogues". However, I still like to "travel", to be a stranger in a foreign land, which is the essence of life. So, my ideal now is:
Write a bestseller, make a fortune, buy a well-textured suitcase, load it with books and clothes, and then, go to many places, live in restaurants, be strangers, be strangers, and do so, until death. Of course, as far as I know, it was very difficult, and only Nabokov did it.
Li Jingze is a critic and writer. He graduated from the Department of Chinese of Peking University in 1984. He was the editor-in-chief of the people's literature magazine, and is now a member of the party group, vice chairman, secretary of the secretariat of the China Writers Association, and curator of the Museum of Modern Chinese Literature. He has published the commentary collection "To the Ideal Reader", "Conference Room and Hill", "Running Collection", the essay collection "Blue Bird Story Collection", "Yong and Return", the long essay "Drinking Notes", and has won many awards such as the Lu Xun Literary Award literary theory criticism award, the Chinese Literature and Media Award Literary Critic of the Year Award, the Essayist of the Year Award, the October Prose Biennial Award Outstanding Achievement Award and so on.
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