I didn't have long-term personal contact with horses, or even the simple experience of riding a horse from village to village. At best, lead a donkey through the vast herd of horses, or sit on the back of an ox and watch the riders gallop past and raise a cloud of dust.
I don't have too much to do, I don't need to hurry up and do it. The temperament of the cow and the donkey was just right for me—slow and leisurely. At that time, the important things will come to my life far ahead, and I am not in a hurry. The place to go is to stay there forever and doesn't disappear because I'm a few days or years late. It's one thing to do something a few days early or a few days late, and it's nothing to even do it. I'm still in the idle period of my life, and many things are not imminent. Maybe some of the work I did a few steps late was done by someone else, just to save me the work. There are things that I don't belong to me when I'm late for a while, and I don't care. Many years later, the people who galloped on fast horses and the people who rode slowly on the back of an ox returned to the village in the same old age, and they aged at the same rate. Time doesn't matter how fast or how slow it is.
But the figures of horses have been wandering beside me, and the hooves of horses have been stepping on the dirt roads outside the village for many years, and I can't avoid them. I even naively thought that the horse was running so fast, that I must have reached some place before I arrived. The rider must have wandered early where I was going. Because I don't ride a horse, my life path will be stamped with the horseshoe prints of the forerunners and sprinkled with golden horse dung eggs.
It wasn't until later, after I had caught up with and overtaken many horses on foot, that I dispelled the idea that none of the horses that had sped past me and raised a trail of dust had ever gone any further than I did. While I was still going, they had turned into bones piled up on the side of the road, and the rider ran away. Next to the skeleton of the horse, there were only the trunks of poplar trees that dried up like bones, and I did not find half of the rider's bones. Riders will always find ways to bury themselves, whether deep in the loess or far away in the grass and crowds.
On the way away from the village, I often encounter piles of horse bones. What kind of heavy thing has the horse encountered that its body so strong that it cannot withstand, and its four hooves, which are so fast and powerful, cannot escape? These tall, strong beings fell around us, leaving piles of white bones. Our little lives are still alive, how far can we go?
I believe that the one who exhausts a horse, not the rider, is not the perennial rush and fatigue, and these things are insignificant to the horse.
The horse certainly has its own thing. Horses come into the world, and they certainly don't just pull carts and mounts for people.
Han San in the village told me that once he drove a carriage to Shamenzi to deliver wheat seeds to a relative. Halfway through, the carriage fell into a quagmire, and he couldn't pull it out, so he had to go back to someone to borrow livestock to help. However, when he arrived with the men and horses, he found that the horse had pulled the cart out and gone, and there was no shadow. He chased after Shamenzi, where the people said that in the afternoon he saw a carriage pulling a few sacks of things through the village and heading west.
Han San chased west for dozens of miles to the Void Soil Zhuangzi, where the villagers said that in the afternoon they saw a carriage circumventing the village and heading north.
Han San said that he did not chase any more, so he concluded that the horse was something without a goal—it only cared about moving forward on its own, as if its business was more important than people's, and it could even pull a cart of wheat seeds that people were waiting for to be planted to walk endlessly. Han San is a person with a life goal, he will go wherever he wants, he will do whatever he says, he will not endlessly follow a carriage to chase down. After Han San finished speaking, he went to take care of his business.
For many years to come, I thought about the carriage that ran away for Han San. Where did it go?
I have asked everyone who comes from a long way, they either shake their heads, or if there is a carriage that no one wants, they will rush back, and they will not let go of such a cheap thing.
I think the horse had left the road and gone in its own direction. But it won't get rid of cars and condoms. The set is made of horse skin, which is more durable and strong than flesh and bone. A horse will not survive until the set decays.
The wheat seeds on the cart had passed the sowing period earlier, and they sprouted and rotted in one rain after another. Wheels and reeds will also exceed deadlines and rot day by day. Only horses don't stop.
It was the only horse that ran away. We didn't catch up with it, which means it left the bones in a distant place that we haven't yet reached. The reason why the horse is going to run away is that something must be chasing it. That's the mortal enemy we can't see, the horse hits. Horses can't escape it.
I thought of another horse, one tethered to a family's hut. When I saw it, it was dying, too old to look like it. Obviously, it did not grow old in the grass shed, but was tied to the grass shed when it was old. Man is always uneasy about himself, knowing that the horse is old and will never go anywhere again, but he still chains it up, lets it be tied at the last moment, and gives up fighting with fate.
What is even more cruel is that this horse, in its twilight years, can only watch the large stack of hay piled above its head, but it cannot eat a bite.
I tore a handful of grass to the horse's mouth, and the horse only looked at it once and twisted its head again. I knew it couldn't chew this bite of grass anymore. After so many years, the horse's strength finally became weak. A horse that once drove hundreds of pounds of things, ran for dozens of miles without sweating, and did not breathe heavily, but now it could not chew a mouthful of grass.
"Everyone can't carry a sack of wheat when they can't move. Everyone has a time when they can't chew on their bones. I remembered my father's admonition to me, as if he were also speaking to a horse.
When the horse is too old to walk, he may understand many things in the world and how to go on many roads in the world. A horse cannot pass on a lifetime's experience to another horse. When the horse is old, it may be like a man- it has not done anything great in its life, but has only made many mistakes, so it regards its mistakes as precious, and always hopes that other horses can learn something from it. But the young horses that were bouncing around never knew how to respectfully ask an old horse for advice. They have the energy and time to go the wrong way, and isn't that how the old horse gets old?
Horses and people often live their whole lives for the same thing. In the long years of work and the joint labor of the people and horses, the horses and people have aged at the same time. I often see an old man leading a horse through the village back to his house. Man is so old that he probably can't get on the horse, and the horse is too old to move. Man and horse after horse, walking in the dusk of the afternoon.
In this long life, man and horse have paid the same heavy labor. Men summoned horses and carts to hurry, and horses also called people to drink water, feed grass, add materials, and clean up horse dung in the circle. People sometimes take their horses to the vet, like their own fathers. The things that are piled up in a man's life are piled up in the life of a horse. Man only knows that the horse has helped himself to do a lifetime of work, but he does not know that the man has also helped the horse for a lifetime. But in the end, a man can eat the flesh of an old horse and sell the skin, but the horse cannot do this to man.
One winter night, a few people from the village and I, in a field far from the village, sat around a herd of horses and boiled the bones of an old horse. We drank wine and kept adding firewood. We thought that the older the horse, the more things would come out of its bones. More horses stood quietly around, looking at us with their eyes. The fire reflected a large area of the night sky. The horse stood in the shadows, his eyes flashing blue. The horse must have seen us clearly, saw the people clearly. And we don't know anything about horses, we don't understand what horses are thinking. Horses never say a word to people.
The only way we understand horses is by constantly eating horse meat into their stomachs, drinking horse milk into their stomachs, and putting horse skins on their feet. Over time, Cain would feel a horse running in a person's body. There is a strange passion that stirs people, and people become as restless and agitated as horses. In the end, however, we can only use the physical strength and passion of horse meat to do some human things, and sprinkle some wild and complaining about people. What we can't understand with our hearts, we digest it with our stomach.
But we really don't understand horses.
I remember that year in the field, I piled up the hay and I stood in the wind. In the wind farther away, there was a large herd of horses, standing still like stones, motionless. They didn't look at me, the horse's head facing south, looking in unison into a distance I couldn't see. They didn't care about me, the lawnmower, at all.
I stopped what I was doing, and looked at them with such admiration for so long that a passion suddenly arose in my body that I had never felt before. I wanted to hiss, I wanted to run, I wanted to drop my hands on the ground, and I ran to the horses with joy, and I raised my head to see the tomorrow and the distance in the eyes of the horses. I felt the hissing of a thousand horses buried in my throat, and the galloping of ten thousand hooves on all fours. And I, just lowered my head, sighed softly.
I have never kept a horse, unlike some people in the village who don't have their own horses, but like to steal other people's horses to ride. At night, take out other people's horses in the dark and ride them for the night, go to the distance to finish their own business, and then tie the horses back to the circle before dawn. The next day the master rode his horse to run an emergency, but the horse could not run. The horse would not tell its owner what had happened last night, but the horse knew how far he could run. Whoever you run, the horse will not run after the road of its life. It is useless for men to whip the horse no matter how loud it is.
Horses never belonged to anyone.
Don't think that a horse has been running under your crotch for years, and that this horse is yours. In the eyes of a horse, you are nothing more than a thing that is carried by it. Maybe the horse has already made you an organ of its own, placed high on the horse's back, watching the way for it, pulling the reins, and sometimes coming down to feed it grass, comb it, and repair its hooves.
Perhaps, it is a pity that I did not ride a fast horse for a while. Many years later, something finally caught up with me from behind. Those were all damn things, and I didn't take them seriously when I was younger, and I wasn't anxious about myself. One day I looked back and saw that they were close at hand. Only then did I understand the horses that had been running non-stop in the past years, and the people who had been riding and running. Horses are not being run by a whip, they are not. The horse was running on its own. Horses were born and began to run. Man is simply riding himself of the fate of his fate with the speed of a horse.
Are people and horses really running in the same direction? Maybe man's escape path is the way the horse dies, or maybe the horse is dead when he returns.
Anyway, I didn't run on horseback, I kept my speed. For some years people rushed towards a certain place, and I was left far behind, as if abandoned. Other years people turned their heads and ran in the opposite direction, and I was still slowly walking slowly, far ahead of them. I'm one of those people. I don't ride horses.
After looking at the feeling: immature people die heroically for great causes, and mature people live humbly for great causes. ----- Salinger, "The Catcher of the Rye"
Sometimes life should still slow down, everyone has everyone's rhythm of life, and sometimes slow down to appreciate the beauty around them.
