A person with dyslexia, Yuan Ming

Yuan Ming, a great talent in the Qing Dynasty, liked to read since he was a child, but he came from a poor family of staff, and there were few books in the family. He has also gone to other people's homes to borrow books, but who will be at ease to hand over precious books to children? Do not give. He returned home and borrowed books at night in his dreams. This failed borrowing incident made Yuan Ming very hurt, and many years later, he also wrote this matter into his famous article "Huang Sheng Borrowed Books".

In his poem "Sigh to the Book", he also said that when he was a child, he passed by the bookstore, and when he saw the books he wanted, he could only stare dryly and drool a little, but he couldn't afford to buy them, go back to dream at night, and buy the books he looked at during the day.

I am twelve or thirteen years old, and I love books as much as I love life.

Every time you pass through the bookstore, your feet stand first.

There is no money to buy books, and I still buy them in my dreams.

Most of the excerpts that have been taken so far are from childhood.

--Qing Yuan Ming, "Sigh to the Book"

In ancient times, there were no video games, no tv phones, no internet. Reading, for some children who have already appreciated the taste of words, is a good extracurricular hobby, but also a pleasure that will make children addicted.

Yuan Mei loves to read and also writes well. He studied poetry at the age of nine, entered Xiucai at the age of twelve, supplemented at the age of nineteen, became a mid-career scholar at the age of twenty-two, and was elected as a Shu jishi of the Hanlin Academy at the age of twenty-four, equivalent to the emperor's personal secretary. Massive reading is an important basis for Yuan Meike's pride.

At the age of twenty-seven, Yuan Ming, who was working at the Hanlin Academy, was released as an official because he failed the Manchu examination. Yuan Ming was not enthusiastic about his career, claiming that being an official was nothing more than "being a slave for a high official", and what he never forgot was to read. "Every time you pass through a bookstore, you are thirsty and see a spring, and your body has not gone to the heart." After serving as a county magistrate, at the age of thirty-four, Ding's father (who kept filial piety for his father), resigned his official post and returned to Nanjing, and for 300 taels of silver, he bought more than 300 acres of abandoned gardens (this garden was built by Cao Xueqin's grandfather Cao Yin, that is, the prototype of "Grand View Garden") and transformed it into "Sui Garden". Yuan Ming settled in Nanjing from then on, and lived a leisurely life of reading and writing and studying food as he wished, until his death at the age of eighty-two.

In the second half of his life, Yuan Ming was frustrated in the official field, the literary world was proud, writing apprentices, studying poetry, tea and wine, food, garden architecture, writings involving essays, notes, poems, poems, and literary reviews, etc., Peach and Plum Garden, famous in the world. Yuan's literary words were "Qing Ling and Wonderful", and he constructed a systematic theory of creation and poetic advocacy, and his poems were "shocking when people were deaf and deaf" (Qing Wang Chang's "Pu Brown Mountain Room Poetry") "The imperial court secretary of state and the city well were well known for their names", and he was the leader of the poetry circle at that time and a literary hero.

Being able to stand out among millions of Qing Dynasty literati and being promoted as a famous writer of the Qing Dynasty by the people of the time and posterity is certainly related to his lifelong love of reading; extensive reading provides an endless stream of energy and inspiration for his free creation.

Yuan Ming's garden was also a famous garden at that time. Yuan Mei spent ten years renovating Suiyuan, opening it to the public, sharing private gardens with others, and renting out part of the woodland to open a private kitchen. Yuan Mei, a local lord, opened a tutoring class, carved and sold poetry, and operated a catering industry, and his economic situation was greatly improved. With surplus money in his hand, the book habit of reading that had been frustrated when he was a child began to break out, and he went everywhere to buy books, "to go to the books, to fall full", accumulating as many as 400,000 books.

What is the concept of four hundred thousand volumes? The title of the book alone is a few million words. He specially built a private library building "Kokura Mountain House" and "Sohaoxuan" to collect books, and wrote "Sohaoxuan", in which he said that he was delicious, lustful, good garden, friends, travel, flowers and bamboo spring stones, Juezhang Yizun, celebrity calligraphy and painting, but "with the group of good enemies and books win also", all hobbies are not as good as good books. Because of other hobbies, there are many restrictions such as age, timing, space, wealth, physical strength, etc., but reading is suitable for young and strong, old and sick, hunger and cold, wind and rain. That is to say, reading, the threshold is the shortest, the conditions are the lowest, as long as there is light, you can spread the volume to read, at any time you can wander too vain, honor and disgrace.

As a super life winner, Yuan Ming has a way to make money and money, does not have to work hard for his livelihood, money freedom, brings personality and time freedom, and the second half of his life is relaxed, reading and writing, and sightseeing. His penchant for reading has also been fully released. As soon as he had leisure, he indulged in books, claiming that he had "not tasted a day of wasted books", and there was no day in his life that he did not read books.

In addition to reading, Yuan Ming continued to create all his life, diligently wrote, the big Kai xiaokai in his hand was a wolf, ploughed out page after page of raw propaganda, wrote one poem after another, and achieved remarkable results in his life. His people love freedom, music is loose, his personality is uninhibited, and most of the poems he writes have a true temperament, great innocence, and are not interesting. The quality of the poems is first-class, and the number is also very impressive, such as the "Complete Collection of Yuan Ming" compiled by Mr. Wang Yingzhi, which contains more than 4 million words of Yuan Ming's poems.

Yuan Mei has been addicted to reading and reading all his life, but this addictive behavior, which may be called "reading addiction", cannot be written into genes and cannot be passed on to the next generation. In the poem "Lamentations to the Book", he writes:

The two children are like my years, and they are indifferent to the book.

This matter is not a court discipline, and it needs to be a simple fate in ordinary life.

"I loved books so much when I was a child, and now my two babies have reached the age when I loved books like my life, how come I saw books but were not interested at all?" Being able to read spontaneously and get pleasure from it may have nothing to do with acquired education, or it depends on fate. ”

Facing his several private libraries, looking at the hundreds of thousands of books piled from the floor to the ceiling, Yuan Mei sighed: So many books, are they handed over to children who have no interest in books?

In his later years, after sharing his private garden and exclusive cuisine with the people of the time, Yuan Ming also took out the books he had painstakingly and carefully selected and collected, and shared them with the readers of the world. A lifetime of books, complete in one word: send.

Send the court, send friends. How much to send? Sixty or seventy percent.

In 1773, the Qianlong Emperor compiled the "Four Libraries of Complete Books" and issued an edict for folk books, and Yuan Ming dedicated most of the orphan secret books he collected to the imperial court, and some to his friends. To this end, he wrote two short essays, "Scattered Secretaries" and "Afterword of Scattered Books", with few words, but with open-minded wisdom in life.

Yuan Ming's act of scattering books, some friends both regretted for him, but also felt confused. He said in the "Scattered Secretaries": Where is there anything under the heavens that will never be scattered? Some of the ancient bibliophiles had more than ten times more books than mine, and as a result, their books were used by future generations as firewood and burned, thrown into the water and thrown away. What a blessing it is for these books to be given to the people and institutions that value them now. I watched these books go where they were supposed to go, and I was relieved. Moreover, after many books are owned by me, I don't read much; now every time I give away one, I have to race against the clock to study it day and night, and quickly write down the important content and the novel, fun, and interesting parts of it into notes and write them down in my mind. The book was given away, but the essence of the book really became mine. Besides, with thousands of acres of fertile land, how much can a person eat? With a series of mansions, how many can a person really use? Delete the complexity and simplify, from the Bo back to the contract, is the essence of the external object.

belch! Makes sense!

He added: Only those who engage in examination and academic research are the more books the better, and tens of thousands of books are not enough; for a writer like me, a thousand books that I often read are enough. My main business is to write articles out of thin air, mainly to write books for people to read to people to study and examine, and there are so many talents in this dynasty that I will give my collection of books to these people who study and learn.

ay! Kind of interesting!

In this way, Yuan Ming, who had once been a lover of books, gave away a large part of his private collection in his old age, waved his hand, and bid farewell to his former cherishing.

Yuan Ming is a wayward spirit, non-Confucian, once called "the six classics are all bad", his people are lustful and affectionate, multi-gold and many disciples, male and female disciples, wives and concubines, more than sixty years old still taking concubines, and never hide their bisexual sexuality.

Judging from his behavior of buying books frantically in middle age and scattering most of them in his later years, he was really the most maverick and open-minded literati in the Ming and Qing dynasties.