Qianjiang Evening News hourly news reporter Zhang Jinhua
Writer Miao Wei.
Miao Wei, a writer and former deputy editor-in-chief of Sanlian Life Weekly, is a reader and a person with a rich heart. Over the years, most of his work has been related to reading, and he has published many essays and novels. His rich experience in reading and writing has made his literary experience more unique and his insight into life and the world more profound. In his new book", "Thirty Lectures on Literary Experience", Miao Wei shares his experience of reading dozens of foreign literary classics over the years, and also tells his thoughts on essential issues such as love, loneliness, and death, as well as his understanding of basic objects such as self, others and the world.
"Literary experiences are really about my feelings, and most of these experiences are related to some difficult situations in life. I hope you have something to gain, to look at life from a literary point of view, to see the human situation, to feel a little more delicate, a little richer in the soul. Miao Wei said.
Thirty literary nights, an antidote to the soul, and experience the charm of dozens of foreign literary classics through one book.
On the evening of May 8, Miao Wei was a guest in the one-way space, sharing with Hangzhou readers who like literature and young people who like him how reading literature has shaped himself and his "theory of the usefulness of reading".
Speaking of whether the humanities are useful in the end, Miao Wei's answer is free and reasonable, he said: "Many years ago, I read an article written by a history professor in the United States, "Learning History To Die of Hunger", he said that the humanities are on the decline, has been going downhill, but learning history, learning literature is not completely useless, you will have the ability to read and write, you can understand language better, and you will learn a lot of metaphors. For example, our own boss, we will ask, is your boss like Yue Buqun or Zuo Leng zen? At the very least, you are a person who will use jin Yong novels as a metaphor.
Miao Wei and the book.
[He threw out a series of life questions, do you have the answers]
In this book, Miao Wei threw out a series of life questions to himself-
Afraid of death? Of course. Do you feel lonely? It's always been a little lonely. A little crazy? OK. What will the world look like in the future? uncertain. Why do I think differently than others? Is there something I don't know about it? Are so many people in the world really related to me? What should I sympathize with and who can I pity? Am I a little pathetic? What is love?
Are these questions also the basic problems of your and my life?
Literature, on the other hand, is actually about talking about and exploring the basic problems of life.
Miao Wei is both bookish and grounded. In life, friends called him "Master Miao".
One day, Master Miao had a sudden thought: If you were given a large sum of money and asked you to make a movie, what would you shoot?
In fact, what he really wanted to ask was what we were looking for.
Master Miao's first lecture was about loneliness, and he cited McCullers's "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter", and said that-
If you are satisfied with your marriage, your parents, your family life, your career, your friends, congratulations, you don't need literature very much, you just need to read a little pastime novel.
If you find these questions difficult to answer, difficult to say satisfied, and unsatisfied, you may need literature: talking to the characters in the book can help us better face loneliness.
People are very lonely, and even deep love is difficult to change loneliness.
Some people will die of accidents, from disease, or, like a prophet, from despair. But more people will be slowly swallowed up by the years, which is actually the essence of life. Our emotions are richer, and we have a sense of tragedy about life, which allows us to better appreciate the fullness of life.
Talking about the nature of life and human emotions, Master Miao also talked about it interestingly.
Epikek was a computer, and he learned to write poetry and burned himself out. The student in "Death Poetry Society" originally wanted to go to medical school, but he was seduced by the literature teacher and had to study acting, and he committed suicide. In the movie "All the Time", there is such a line. Virginia Woolf's husband chatted with her and said why does one of her characters in the novel have to die? Woolf says that for the sake of contrast, the dead show life to the living. Her husband then asked, who would die? Woolf replied, poets, those who were prophets.
The theme of the third lecture is the image that we will never forget. Miao Wei took Duras's famous work "Lover" as an example -
What particularly beautiful clothes do you wear and wear them to feel like you express yourself? Do you have an image of yourself that you never forget, such as when you were fifteen, or in your early twenties? What kind of clothes and shoes were you wearing at that time? Are you wearing a hat? Did you grease and powder? Is there lipstick? Was this image photographed? Has it been played repeatedly in your mind? If you were to use words to tell someone about this image, how would you write it?
If you can't read the novel "Lover" and think Duras is too nagging, then you can also think about the above question.
Does Master Miao want to know the answer? This question about the experience of daily life, out of the literary works back to reality, many girls have something to say.
Perhaps women pay more attention to the details of everyday life than men. In fact, many women will remember which dress she wore on her birthday in a certain year, and how she wore it when she dated someone in a certain year. The so-called unforgettable day, so many daily life, image and other details, is part of this "unforgettable".
As he said in his fourth lecture, a person is a container of memory, a carrier of memory. Memories can sometimes sustain people to live. Your heart, your past memories, the people who slept with you don't care much, only you care.
Shaping oneself with memory, this thing does exist. And literature reminds us that no matter what happens, something else is happening in the world.
Miao Wei also uses the two novels "Dying Flesh" and "Mortals" to talk about a fact: the body contains as many life stories as the brain, there are stories of aging, there is beauty, and there is also a continuous extraction of the body.
Readers.
[He is painstaking and hopes that everyone will have the ability to read]
As Master Miao said, "This book has only one wish: 'There was a friend who said very imposingly, he said that he was reading books to lag behind this era.' Hope you maintain your reading ability. ’”
In this "Thirty Lectures on Literary Experience", Master Miao repeatedly stressed that he hopes that you will maintain your reading ability in this era.
Why does Master Miao want you to be a reader like him? Because, reading can —
Let you in the era of "value pluralism": learn to accept and appreciate "aliens"; get rid of simplistic thinking patterns and have the patience to understand more complex narratives; oppose clichés, improve your vigilance against emotional expressions and clichés; not vulgar and not resist in the face of more difficult to understand high cultures; open up multiple aspects of life and embrace a wider world.
So, what is the ability to read?
Miao Wei' thinking as a deep reader, he pointed out the "faults" in people's reading at present.
For example, in "Why Did He Eat a Piece of Watermelon in "Sage Time"", he said: Are we getting simpler now? For example, if you use the "three views of righteousness" to ask for literary and artistic works, whose three views are correct? D. Is H. Lawrence positive? Is Nietzsche positive? Can't "step on one and hold one"? But cultural products need to be judged to be good or bad! Is everything measured by "I understand it" and "Whether I like it or not"? political correctness? Where does this standard come from? Are we impatient with more complex narratives? Have we seen too much (and probably written too much) emotional stuff? Are we just staying on the first reaction, and the evaluation of the article is to relieve anger, pain, resignation, farting, nonsense, really good? Would we think a little deeper?
He also criticized a "consumer mentality": More than a hundred years ago, Wilde said that art that the public was not interested in survived, and that there was good poetry in Britain because the British did not read poetry and had no influence on poetry. He said that we now have a bad problem, that is, we always think of ourselves as cultural consumers, everything is measured by whether I like it or not, Whether I understand it or not, and I love to go to Douban to score when I have nothing to do, but I refuse to spend time figuring out what I don't understand.
He hoped, "We'll think a little deeper." This is probably also the ideal reader in Master Miao's mind.
What exactly is the literary experience? Miao Wei talked interestingly here.
He exemplifies this in the book. Chekhov has a novel, "The Woman with the Puppy", which writes about a man and a woman who steal an affair, and after the two go to bed, the man eats a piece of watermelon. Literary history classes will talk about the achievements of Chekhov's short stories, and literary criticism will talk about this detail to present a kind of authenticity.
The literary experience might focus on that watermelon: Why did he eat a piece of watermelon "in sage time"? Can't he eat some oranges? Watermelon so much juice, dripping on the fingers how sticky ah - maybe the secret love is also so sticky.
The sharing session is on-site.
He quoted the literary critic Harold Bloom as saying, "Reading is an elite ability, and the general public will not read in the future, only the elite will read." Miao Wei said, "I read this at the time and thought he was overstated, but now that I look at it, I think he is probably right." Later, reading is an ability that only elites have. Whether you agree with what I say or not, if you still have the ability to read, keep it up. I wouldn't say to myself that we're going to use reading against the Internet, against videos, against American dramas; I just say with a little nostalgia that if we still have the ability to read, we must keep it. ”
Hesse was also quoted: "If the ability to read is still a part of your life now, then you are like a lucky person with an amulet." Human reading ability is advanced, and in childhood, everyone is happy to know the alphabet at first, then happy to be able to read a sentence, and then to read some fairy tales. Those who later did not receive the spiritual call to read turned their attention to news reports or commercial sections of newspapers. In the end, there is a small group of people who are constantly obsessed with words. They have received an ecstatic and magical call, and after acquiring the ability to read, they have not used it as a tool, but have completely fallen into the kingdom of books and excavated step by step how vast and profound the world is. At first, they thought it was a beautiful garden for children, with beds woven of tulips and small golden ponds, but now this garden has become a park, a landscape, a part of the earth. This world, with its heavenly Ivory Coast, is full of seductive ecstasy and often new petals. Moreover, yesterday it looked like a garden, a park or a tropical jungle, today and tomorrow it looks more like a temple, with thousands of foyers and courtyards, and the spiritual wealth of all peoples and ages, all waiting to be awakened to form a polyphonic chorus. For the real reader, in the endless world of the book, where everyone can find their own part, there are a thousand places to reach through the jungle, each pointing to a new beginning, each step pointing to an open path. ”
It seems that in Miao Wei's understanding of reading, reading is not only an ability, but also a kind of poetry of life, a little romance and luck.
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Source: Qianjiang Evening News Hourly News