01 My Memory of the Red Chamber
I began to read "Dream of the Red Chamber" when I was twelve or thirteen years old, and I was fascinated by it and my homework was a mess. So for a while my family forbade me to read Dream of the Red Chamber.
I remember a copy of "Dream of the Red Chamber" that I bought in the street, which was made of stills of Lin Daiyu, who was played by a movie star at the time, hiding in a quilt at night and looking at it with a flashlight.
Therefore, "Dream of the Red Chamber" is a special memory for me, a memory of a teenager without private feelings.
The earliest "Dream of the Red Chamber" was copied by hand. Whoever likes it, copy it by hand. Now friends will feel incredible, how to copy by hand?
Now take a "Dream of the Red Chamber", we are already frightened just by looking at the printed materials, let alone hand-copied.
But for people my age, it's completely understandable. When I was in college, I also copied Lu Xun's novels by hand, because the photocopier was not developed at that time.
Borrowing Lu Xun's "Scream" and "Wandering" from National Taiwan University, which were listed as "banned books" at that time, a friend who secretly borrowed them said that you must pay them back in two days. So we copied it all night long, and one person was tired of copying, so he ran to sleep, and the other person continued to copy.
So I know what a "manuscript" is, and a "manuscript" means that you really like that work, and if you can't buy it, you can copy it by hand.
I think that the first people who liked to read the manuscript of "Dream of the Red Chamber" may not care whether it is literature or not, and whether it will be put in the literature department as an object of study.
The important thing is that it looks so good, so that you can see it when you are twelve, look at it again at thirty, and look at it at forty. Watching "Dream of the Red Chamber" at different ages, feeling different, but all "good-looking".
When I was a child, my family forbade me to watch "Dream of the Red Chamber" on the one hand, and on the other hand, I said that "Dream of the Red Chamber" was really beautiful. The adult world is contradictory. I was not allowed to see it, and I said that it was too good to see.
Of course, I was curious, and when I hid in the quilt and watched "Dream of the Red Chamber", I thought: Maybe adults have peeked at it like this before.
02 Era value
"Dream of the Red Chamber" we can read it all the time, at different ages.
Because "Dream of the Red Chamber" presents a phenomenon of life, it allows you to see the various states that these people experience, which involves the author's own rare tolerance and his sense of transcendence in his attitude towards life.
For individuals, every time you read "Dream of the Red Chamber", you will find something that has not been discovered; for the times, different eras will also find different meanings of "Dream of the Red Chamber".
A good literary work is like a good painting, which can adapt to different environments in different human spaces, giving people new understanding and new inspiration.
Why is this happening? Generally speaking, when we create a work of art, we are very subjective, hoping that it will affect people, or hoping that this novel can change human nature.
Once we have presupposed this position, in the process of collecting information and observing human nature, we will specially choose what we want, and deliberately exclude what we don't need.
As long as there is a preset position, the observation of human nature must be relatively narrow. When Cao Xueqin wrote "Dream of the Red Chamber", she did not have a preset position, so "Dream of the Red Chamber" will become a great work.
Sometimes, patriarchal, monarchical, and teacher authorities all say, because I want to love and care for you, so you don't know too much. All love can become an excuse for authority.
But what is love? Giving the other person the greatest freedom of thought and choice is true love. "Dream of the Red Chamber" can still have such a big effect in the modern sense, because the love it embodies is love in the true broad sense.
In the author's writing, human nature is complex, it sometimes degenerates, sometimes there are all kinds of desires that cannot be controlled by itself.
In the face of this complexity of human nature, he feels that these downward human natures interact with the so-called upward and good human nature, and must be depicted in their entirety, so that readers can have their own choices when watching "Dream of the Red Chamber".
"Dream of the Red Chamber" is a book that many people are willing to read repeatedly, because your life will be inspired and grown by it, and the author has never been very authoritative to tell you how to live.
When I read "Dream of the Red Chamber", I often remind myself that everyone in the novel is a part of my body, and I have a part of Jia Zheng and a part of Jia Rui.
I don't feel like I'm out there observing these characters, or praising and criticizing them. Good literature will make you feel that every character is yourself, and you will think about how to adjust these parts of your personality.
03 You can read books for a lifetime
In ancient China, there was a habit of catching weeks, and when a child turned one year old, his parents would prepare many things for him to catch, to see what he wanted to catch.
His father must have put in front of him the Four Books, the Five Classics, swords, wat plates, official seals, and other things, and the farthest place must have been what the adults hoped he would not be able to catch.
Jia Baoyu grabbed the woman's ring rouge. Therefore, the father Jia Zheng felt that his son was a drunkard and did not like him since he was a child.
Every time I read this paragraph, I find it terrifying. Because he grabbed some girls' powder rouge, his father always thought he was a stupid boy.
Jia Baoyu grabbed Zhou at the age of one, as if he had already decided the fate of his life. In the novel, Jia Yucun begins to defend his life.
In real life, we often divide people into good or bad. Even when we relay a story, we can't help but add our own praise and criticism.
It is probably very difficult to make yourself like a mirror, to present a phenomenon clearly and cleanly. Every time I read this paragraph, I have a feeling that Jia Baoyu's behavior makes most people think that he is an adulterous demon.
Confucian culture is accustomed to dividing people into good and evil, and this good and evil are almost fixed things, and there is no room for turning.
A large part of the gray area between black and white in human nature is ignored. In fact, when you're making judgments all the time, there's no way to really get a deeper understanding of the nature of human nature.
Man's yearning for the good, and the attraction of the sinking of evil, are actually two forces walking together. In education, after the wandering of human nature is examined, the discussion of human nature is more multifaceted.
Literature plays a very important role, because people in literature are never absolutely good or absolutely bad, and it is difficult to become literature for both absolute good and absolute bad.
"Dream of the Red Chamber" is a book that can be read for a lifetime, and the description of each character is very meticulous, so that people can read at different ages and will have different understandings.
The biggest benefit that reading "Dream of the Red Chamber" brings to us is that it can make us know more about people and human nature, and understand more. After understanding, it is not to grab other people's pigtails, but to learn to be tolerant of others.
People have vulnerabilities, it all depends on how you take care of them.
Edit: Wang Yun
This article is excerpted from "Jiang Xun's Detailed Dream of the Red Chamber"
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