We will eventually be reunited with the words we have read
“Only in writing will one return to the moment of solemnly facing oneself, the moment when one communicates first with oneself and secondly with oneself and others. “
When I was very young, there was a Tang poem taught to me, “The sunset is infinite, only near dusk.” I did not understand this poetic meaning, and after memorizing it, it existed as syllables in It existed in my memory as a syllable. I remember when I was in elementary school, one day in the fourth or fifth grade, shortly after the Cultural Revolution had ended and my father was in his prime. I think my father must have been in a bad mood that day because of something at work, or something in the Family.
At that Time, there was still a large section of the city wall in Fenyang, which was just outside the west gate, and standing on the wall, opposite the coach station. That day my father took me to climb the city wall, the two of us went up the wall. My father usually talks to me quite a lot, and when he is with me, he often tells me what this is and what that is; but that day, after going up the wall, my father was very silent, and his silence made me think that this was a special moment, and I never thought that he didn’t say a word. Sitting on this mound of earth – because the bricks of the wall had been pulled – sitting on that wall, watching the sun slowly descend in the west, I suddenly understood the poem, why “Driving up the ancient plain,” I understood my father. That’s reading.
I think that sometimes you resonate with what you’ve read yourself, not in the moment of reading, but much later. There’s a kind of words, there’s a kind of refinement of those creators of words, those writers, that tell us what our mood is at this moment, who help us understand ourselves, understand what kind of emotional fluctuations we ourselves are going through. That line of Tang poetry made me feel a different kind of emotion in the heart of a child, and this emotion has a sense of strangeness, and the so-called poetic meaning is created in such strangeness.
Underneath this wall is the coach station. The sound of the bus station was what I was most fascinated by as a child, because it had a tannoy. That transportation line was the road from Taiyuan to the military headquarters, the only road to the Yellow River in those days, and it was very busy. The Fenyang bus station was very dense with passengers, and standing on the city walls, or inside the county, you could often hear the voice of the radio: several buses heading to Wucheng, Dawu, Jundu, and Jia County would be leaving soon. That voice was very important to me growing up. The names of these places meant faraway places to me.
That sound left a deep impression on me, and I always wanted to describe that sound, but I could never do so. One day when I was in college, I read a short story by Mr. Shen Congwen called “The Company Commander”, which tells the story of a soldier stationed in a mountain fortress. I think this word is too accurate, this is not the sound of the coach station I heard at the time the sound of the station name?
We all have moods, we all have things on our minds, but literature will allow us to record these moods and things on our minds, it will leave traces of the emotional journey we have experienced, and it will even make our emotional journey clear. It may not necessarily be a complete memory of an event, nor is it necessarily a three-dimensional knowledge and understanding of a person, but it is even such an unspeakable, poetic moment that those of us without literary ability can feel, but cannot express.
So, in literature, what I always enjoy is how my own emotions, my own emotions, encounter other writers’ literary works and create a kind of resonance, which in turn helps me understand myself.
Every book you read is a new friend, every book you read is an exchange with a great mind, we can communicate with Confucius thousands of years ago, we can also communicate with current writers, we can communicate with Chinese writers, we can also communicate with Marquez, you will enter a special environment of friends, to do spiritual interaction. And reading itself, the more important it is for the less developed living conditions, to put it bluntly, the poorer the children need to read. Of course, everyone needs to read.
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