"Good Books Can Be Read for a Lifetime" is one of the series of books "My Reading Experience" edited by Fu Jie, Distinguished Professor of Ma Yifu College of Zhejiang University, inviting Rong Xinjiang, Xu Jun, Chen Sihe, Chen Zishan and Chen Shangjun, five scholars who have made great achievements in the academic field, to tell their reading experience and the road of governance. The five keynote speakers love books, read books for decades, read countless books, know what is a good book, how to read a good book, and their reading sharing also contains the principle of governing learning, cultivating people and becoming talents, which can provide useful reading, learning and research guidance for readers in the era of information fragmentation, especially young readers.
"A good book can be read for a lifetime"
Fu Jie is the editor-in-chief
Published by Shanghai People's Publishing House
Inviting me to give a lecture today, this is the first time in 2021, it has a more special meaning for me, and in this new year, I am already seeing the sun for the 70th year.
I was born in 1952 and am 70 years old this year, but I don't feel old enough, so I'm still working hard, like a young man. Of course, I envy all my young friends, and you guys are so nice. In 2019, I wrote a preface to Xia Jing's teacher, and Mr. Wang Shuizhao said at the Song Dynasty Literature Annual Conference that there were four words in the preface that he was particularly impressed with, "It is good to be young."
Now that I'm 70 years old, it's time to look back on my life experiences. There are several key points. After eight years of farming, I came to Fudan University on March 1, 1977, and was the last batch of workers, peasants, and soldiers. The college entrance examination has not yet resumed, so I got this opportunity to blend into the university. But the next year, in March 1978, I signed up for graduate school, and that year, I was admitted to graduate school with the first professional score and the second overall score. It was the first graduate school, so my classmates were much older than me, and I was pretty young.
After this, how to explore a path academically and do really meaningful work has a relatively long process. At first, I worked very hard to climb the title, and I was also very special, climbing from lecturer to associate professor for ten years, but from associate professor to head of the department, it was only more than four years. After this, I also did some work that I did not expect, especially in recent years, I think the big change is that I used to think that more popular articles, or articles with some temperament, I am not very good at writing, but in recent years, I have suddenly become interested, write a lot, and have new views on myself.
I have been in my forty-fourth year in Fudan so far, and I feel very lucky, but from the perspective of looking back on life, I think it is also full of hardships.
Although I study the ancients and say that the head is the Tao, when I want to look back on my own life, sometimes I have to tell you, and I can't say it clearly myself. Because I know very well that when I first came to Fudan in 1977, I didn't know what the university was for, didn't know that the university was divided into departments, and I didn't know how the university taught classes.
But just over a year later, I was able to successfully enter graduate school and have a great transformation of myself.
I'm here to review a little bit of my own experiences as a young man. My parents are from Ningbo, but they live in Nantong. When I was young, my family was fine, probably before I was six or seven years old, my parents took me to see Yue opera every night, and I don't remember what to sing, but I had this sense of rhythm since I was a child. After going to primary school, it is the fourth affiliated primary school of Nantong Normal School.
Nantong is a special place, we often talk about the late Qing Dynasty Emperor Zhang Jian in Nantong to run an industry, I have looked back over the years, may have got a lot of unexpected gains in Nantong. The education from primary to secondary school in Nantong, as well as the cultural atmosphere of Nantong, may have influenced me. I remember that the primary school Chinese teacher, who was the mayor of Fort Lee Town in Hai'an in the 1940s, was quite fond of me at that time, thinking that I would be able to pass the nantong middle school.
Maybe I didn't do well in the middle school entrance examination, so I entered the Second Junior High School of Nantong City, which belongs to the middle school in Nantong City. At that time, I was very young, of course, I did not understand things, but Chairman Mao had a saying that you should be concerned about major state affairs. The way I was concerned at that time was to look at the big character poster on a street in Nantong City every night, either by myself or accompanied by my mother, and every day. I believe that in this process, the cultural atmosphere of Nantong will also have some influence on me.
I read books myself, I can remember, when I was in the second grade of primary school, I borrowed a set of "Water Margin" from the classroom teacher, and I also read the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" in the line when I was in elementary school. At that time, more comic strips were seen.
On March 16, 1969, a group of our intellectuals responded to the call to Jiangxinsha Farm in Haimen, Nantong, a small island formed by the impact on the Yangtze River. At that time, I was ignorant to the point that I always felt that an island was standing in that place, and there was water on all sides. After arriving there, I returned to reality from the psychology of a naughty boy. The first three years were managed by local farmers, because this was a state-run farm, called the old staff to manage Zhiqing, so we really suffered a lot.
In the next four or five years, we knew that the old workers of the Youth Management were very hard, and the days of managing people were very happy. I can also brag with their rural kids. I used to manage six or seven hundred acres of land, and every morning before dawn I began to ask people to go to the ground, and every day I stood at the head of the farm village to arrange farm work.
I was very poor at home or in other abilities, but in the eight years on the farm, I experienced the hardest workouts, and my weak, vulnerable, and ignorant state of being changed. Some things are not easy for young people to understand now, we can say that we have infinitely magnified the energy of our own lives, experienced the hardships of Chinese farmers, lived with Chinese farmers, and experienced the harshest physical and mental tests in undertaking the most arduous farm work.
There is no exaggeration in what I say. We were a big farm, and there were thousands of young people on the farm, and the hardships of labor at that time far exceeded our ability. For example, when I pick up the burden, my legs are shaking, but I have to walk a few miles to carry the burden, so I have to take on other management work. For example, if we pick cotton now, if the current students go to the countryside, they will feel full of romantic feelings, but when you are in the management of scoring, you are responsible for a unit, and you are there every day to weigh how much cotton a certain person has picked up. I myself can proudly say that as a young intellectual, I did not have any slack in working with farmers, and I was not able to get the maximum exercise. In the decades of Fudan, my experience and feelings about farming and the state of survival have not changed much. The tenacity and amplification of life of Chinese farmers is unlimited.
However, I feel that I have a lot of lucky places to go to the farm, and I am not quite the same as others. I was a junior high school student, but one of the company in our farm was a group of high school students from Nantong Middle School, and it was obvious that the high school students were much more mature than the first year students. They once had a Chinese teacher who did research on Tang and Song dynasties, very famous, called Yan Dichang. At that time, they often talked about how Teacher Yan was, and the books that Teacher Yan instructed them to read came to me on the farm.
In the hardships of labor, I have a group of middle school students around me who are better than me, which is really a good thing, I see the gap between us, and I follow the study, for eight years. I remember exactly that I arrived at the farm on March 16, 1969, and left on February 26, 1977, eight years apart in twenty days. During these years, I experienced both intense labor and eager to read, and I met a group of very good friends, which was really lucky.
Looking back at the books I had read at that time, some of them survived before the 1960s, such as the literary history of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and I saw the second volume of the three volumes, for example, Mr. Liu Dajie's "History of the Development of Chinese Literature", when the first volume of the fourth revised edition was published, I read it carefully from beginning to end. In the early 1970s, I saw Guo Moruo's "Li Bai and Du Fu" and Fan Wenlan's "Compendium of General History of China". I am now studying Tang poems, and I have a little bit of success, but I saw "Three Hundred Tang Poems" very late, and I didn't see "Three Hundred Tang Poems" until I was about 20 years old. At that time, the "One Hundred Poems of Tang Dynasty" published by the Shanghai Editor of zhonghua bookstore, the predecessor of the Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, was also read, and all of them were borrowed by Zhiqing to read. But for eight years I didn't read systematically, and I could read whatever books I could find.
At that time, there was a past period called "Commenting on "Water Margin", "Criticizing Song Jiang", "Commenting on confucianism", and so on. Although the political movement was very far away from us at that time, we were just on the farm on a small island on the Yangtze River, but in this kind of book, I basically saw what I read, although I did not participate in the specific political movement, but I read the original works of the ancients and some annotated books published at that time. At that time, there was a publication in Shanghai called "Study and Criticism", and now looking back on it, it is said that it involves political conspiracies or political propaganda, but its whole flavor is still different from that of ordinary political publications. There were still some articles with a literary stance, or articles with literary and historical savings, and I read almost every issue at that time. Although I was a very grassroots intellectual on the farm, at that time I was able to see the resumed publications of "Cultural Relics", "Archaeology", "Historical Research", and several other publications, which I had ordered, and I had also subscribed to newspapers. At that time, I tried my best to see everything that came out.
Many friends will ask what they think of the fact that intellectual youth have gone to the mountains and the countryside. I can responsibly say here that there are many very outstanding talents among the young people, but in this decade their studies have been suspended. The future of many of the best young people has been changed. But at least for me, I got to know the Chinese farmers, the cultivation of the land, the growth of crops, from the specific techniques to the grasp of the rhythm, the whole process I was extremely familiar with, I was there every day, I was there to arrange, I was there to check, I was there to take the lead in the work. Even in this kind of life, individuals still have the opportunity to grow.
Before Fudan, compared with other intellectuals, I read a certain amount, read more, and the motivation for self-study was incomparable to that of the class, but the systematicness, completeness or accuracy of knowledge were greatly insufficient. Although I have been the head of the department in the Chinese department for a while, I always know that my foundation is not very good, for example, the simplest subject of modern Chinese, the object of the object, the fixed complement, I am not easy to fully explain clearly, because there is really no teacher to introduce me to the system. After I studied and worked in the Chinese Department, I did not have the opportunity to ask for advice from others. People think you shouldn't know, but I don't know exactly.
Our generation may have a common problem, when we teach ourselves, we are deep about the problem and the desire to read, that is to the extent that others find it incredible. However, our foundation is generally limited, sometimes we encounter what words will be mispronounced, there are differences in the understanding of the meaning of some words, these knowledge differences, we are also trying to gradually change, but there is no way to completely solve. Because of this layer, I think I am very lucky, eight years of farm life, and if I started from school earlier, it will have a very small impact on me. Although the work is very hard, it is really doing farm work, but this has tempered my will, enhanced my ability to survive, and made me understand that there is such a state of existence in society. This was the first stage of my reading.
My luck came by chance. If I were not the last batch of workers, peasants, and soldiers, by the time the national college entrance examination resumed the following year, I would not be able to pass the college entrance examination, I am not sure. Because of the mathematical physics and chemistry from junior high school to high school, I only read the first grade of junior high school, and I didn't learn it later, so it was really difficult to pass the college entrance examination. But by the time I took the graduate school exam the following year, I was inside the school and could use the school library. I have a systematic review that allows me to sort out the various problems in the history of literature. So I am a passive person in many ways, not how I want to be, but there are others pushing behind - think I am OK, a talent, just dig me out, push me to the front.
After being admitted to graduate school, you will find that people are really very different. I remember very clearly, a few days after entering graduate school, Teacher Yang Ming in our department, who was a full ten years older than me, very humbly took out a copy of the "Longzhou Collection" that he sorted out for me to correct, and when I looked at it, I had actually matured to such an extent, and I really couldn't find The North at that time.
During that time, I felt that I had good learning ability and motivation. Before, I couldn't find books or see books on the farm, from Chinese and foreign masterpieces to various academic works, which were incomparable with Fudan's book resources. After I got to school, I felt that I had a big difference between myself and other people in reading, I always thought that reading books needed to rely on passion, so in the first year of Fudan, I basically read the books in the Fudan Library in the literature and history, especially those related to Chinese, one shelf at a time, and sometimes took the books out and turned them over, were interested in reading, and always regarded reading as something interesting. Progress was very fast during that time.
I've always been a less confident person, but pushing it to a certain extent, I hope I can do things better. At that time, when I applied for graduate school, I heard that 90 people enrolled in a professional course, which really lacked courage. At that time, I remember very clearly, I met Teacher Chen Yunji on the school road, told him about this situation, I asked him if I could do it, Teacher Chen said, your actual level, as long as you play well, there should be a chance. I think the process of the exam is still a good performance, after getting the examination paper, I don't think the questions can't be answered, but I think these questions are too simple.
What's the problem? If you think about it, you come up with ten famous articles, and then you want to point out which dynasty and which person wrote this one. One of the titles is "Eight Songs of Autumn Xing", everyone knows that du Fu wrote it, and I answer everything in each of these ten topics, for example, this one, the author is Du Fu of the Tang Dynasty, and I can say what year and month and where he wrote it. Later, Mr. Wang Shuizhao was responsible for reading the papers- I was much younger than Mr. Wang, but I arrived in Fudan a little earlier than him, when he was just introduced from the Institute of Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, so he did all the hard work, and the examination papers were also his reading papers. He said I played a special role in that place. At that time, in the subjects, my foreign language was slightly weaker, but when the foreign language was in 1978, I could bring a dictionary, although my foreign language was very poor, but the dictionary turned very quickly, so it was still confusing. Later, it was hard to take a foreign language exam when evaluating the title, which was really hard. But fortunately, the good old man in our department was Mr. Jiang Kongyang, who came up with a topic at that time, took out a page of Hegel's original work for me to translate, and I was in the office of the Chinese Department, translating Hegel into a dictionary, and I was still talking about what he meant, so Mr. Jiang also passed it for me.
At that time, when I was studying for graduate school, there was also a very special topic, which was to talk about the historical significance and practical significance of the Red Army's twenty-five thousand-mile long march. At that time, every day I was talking about how the new Long March was going, and I forgot about it and deducted five points. So I had the opportunity to go to Fudan, and when I was studying for graduate school in Fudan, I entered the professional road very smoothly, which was a rare opportunity, and I also seized such an opportunity.
But to be honest, after entering the graduate school stage, I knew very well that I couldn't do it, and I saw that everyone who came in was super strong. Because when the first graduate students were, the difference between the oldest and the youngest was about 20 years, and the oldest of our class was in 1937 and the youngest was in 1955. In terms of academic research, some people have an amazing level of maturity when they enter the school. Teacher You Rujie in our department, after entering the school, participated in an international conference, and the title of the paper he submitted was "From Linguistic Geography and Historical Linguistics to the Origin and Transmission of Cultivated Rice in Asia", he drew a line of rice pronunciation from Japan to India, through China to Southeast Asia, and used the language evolution phenomenon of rice pronunciation to speculate whether the earliest origin of rice was in Yunnan, Guangxi or Southeast Asia. I was surprised to see that article. When I didn't know where the direction was, he had already reached that level, and later learned that he was Mr. Xia Chengtao's nephew and had a family tradition. He graduated in 1962 with a degree in Russian language and has been doing professional research in this area ever since.
The biggest advantage of my person is that I see the wise and the wise, and I am inferior to others, so I try to make up for it. When I started my graduate studies in 1978, the atmosphere of reading was very good. Now the book situation in Fudan has changed, and the library that was open to college students at that time is now the left-handed science library on campus. At the graduate level, you can now go to the foreign affairs office, which is the place of No. 1100, where there is a relatively complete reference reading room for literature, history and philosophy, where you can read books. In 1977 and 1978, the reading atmosphere in the whole school was very good, the library opened at eight o'clock in the morning, and there was a long queue before the opening of the library, basically as soon as the library opened, there was no place immediately. At that time, I used more of the ancient books reading room in the hall on the first floor of Fudan Library. There are several basic sets of books in that place, so there is a chance to read them fully and improve your professional level, although the process is very difficult to say.
Looking back, I went from March 1977 to Fudan, to September 1978, I entered graduate studies, just over a year, this change is actually related to the whole social environment, in 1976 Chinese society changed, the university is very obvious, you can see the atmosphere of hard work, everyone is full of spirit, the pursuit of new goals, I am also wrapped up in this process, keep up with such a rhythm, such a pace.
Chen Shangjun: Distinguished Senior Professor of Fudan University, Director of the Research Center of Ancient Chinese Literature of Fudan University, Dean of Renzhong College of Fudan University, President of the Chinese Tang Dynasty Literature Society, member of the National Leading Group for the Collation and Publication planning of ancient books.
He is the author of "Examination of Han and Tang Literature and Literature", "Examination of Tang Dynasty Literature Series", "Tang Poetry Qiushi", "Interpretation of Tang Renyou Poems", "Zhenshi Interpretation of Tang", "Walking The Tang Dynasty", "Notes on Song and Yuan", "Hao Shang Man and Chen Shangjun's Reading Essays", "Turning To Yi Duoshi", "Reverence for Tradition", "I See Qingshan", "Xingzhi PingyeKuo", as well as literature examination works "New Series of The History of the Old Five Dynasties", "Supplement to Quan Tang Poetry", "Supplement to Quan Tang Wen", etc.
——Excerpt from "Good Books Can Be Read for a Lifetime", published by Shanghai People's Publishing House
Author: Chen Shangjun
Editor: Jiang Chuting