Writer. Visual China|Figure
A dream is important both for public and private.
Because of loneliness, my dream as a child was not just to write, but to hope that all the animals would not be killed. Especially my favorite aquatic animals and insects.
Because in them, there is an attachment to the unfortunate experiences of my childhood. A hairy fish, a small soft-shelled turtle, if they are secretly released into the river in the park without the adult, they will be quietly happy for several days, imagining that they will grow up slowly and can reproduce many children and grandchildren.
During the Spring Festival that year, when I went to Qidong to play, my friend gave a wild giant turtle, weighing 15 pounds, and put it in a basin, which was as big as a basin. I excused myself again and again, and my friend said that it was too temperamental: if you don't accept it, you will break off the relationship! I had no choice but to be heroic on the surface, according to the rules of the rivers and lakes, I saluted him three glasses of liquor with a loud throat and accepted the gift.
But when he turned around, he secretly screamed bitterly! I remember that my late friend Hong Pimo said that if you have to kill, you must also try to avoid rays, turtles, turtles, and turtles. Ray, that is, the Chinese alligator; The turtle, commonly known as the leper turtle, is the largest of the turtle family, this "four immortals in the water" is very supernatural, killing them, the sin is very heavy. Because of my childhood emotions, I would rather trust Mr. Hung.
What to do with it? Turn around and sell? How can you be worthy of a friend? Values are different, in the world of friends, it is a sincerity; Taking it as a favor is a lot of favors, but it is a disguised "killing with a knife". It's not far from being betrayed.
On February 7th, it was a drizzly and very cold day, and Uchiko and I unanimously decided to go to the Binjiang Bund near Longhua and do a stupid thing: release life. And it should be put into the Huangpu River, which ordinary people can't fish. Such a big body, how many small soft-shelled turtles can be bred in imagination, the old soft-shelled turtle is indeed supernatural, since leaving the opening of the east, has been shrinking his head, hanging the war card, how to provoke it and ignore you, and smell the damp breath of the river, then slowly stretched out his head, his eyes showed a fierce light, stretched his neck and looked around, I don't know, the volume is so large, it is not considered a "turtle".
In order to prevent biting, I wore pointed scalp shoes, and picked it directly into the Huangpu River with one foot, and originally hoped that it would look back, as the kind of gratitude that was said in the Ming and Qing Dynasty novels, who knew that the guy simply ignored our affection, floated on the surface of the river, and slowly pulled a section of the road with the demeanor of a king, "Gudu" spit out a string of bubbles, and then disappeared leisurely in the turbid river.
I told this stupid thing to my friend Li Jialin, who is deeply familiar with yin and yang gossip and feng shui, and he laughed and said that life is to do something "stupid", dreams, before they are realized, always seem a little stupid, but people can't live without dreams. For example, I have reviewed for you, since you were 25 years old, you began to "bizarre efforts", the hexagram shows that "it seems to be fruitful", that is, there are both "results" and no "results", this is your life!
I looked at him stupidly, thinking about what he said, "it seems to be fruitful", and I was deeply convinced by his review.
Since I was a child, my dream was to be a novelist. But since 1980, I have been mired in life, dreaming of going back to Shanghai every day, but I also know that it is difficult to return to Shanghai, and it is difficult to go to the sky.
First of all, the college entrance examination failed as expected. Shanghai's "Night University" and "Industry University" both stipulate that you must have a "household registration in the city" to enroll in the school.
Somehow, I suddenly thought of "absenteeism from work". In fact, it was under the pretext that my mother was seriously ill and took "long leave". Her mother, who has long been "cirrhosis", is a little superstitious, and she keeps saying that "her mother is seriously ill" isn't she cursing her? But for the sake of my future, she admitted it and told the factory that she couldn't leave me for a moment.
It's okay for such a big man to eat at home, but in the long run, how can he get it?
I don't care. Every day after breakfast, I took lunch, two flatbreads and a fritters, and went straight to the library.
First of all, "above", the reading room on the second floor - strictly speaking, it is a hall, what to see? In fact, there is no direction, one by one the drawers are opened, and on the index cards, from "Nanjing Plate Duck" and "Rugao Preserved Eggs", to "Chekhov's Short Stories", "Jack London Short Stories" or "Gallic Wars" and "The Last Days of Socrates" - anyway, I read all kinds of books, and this kind of reading is good or bad, and the advantage is that it is "miscellaneous" and has a wide field of vision; The disadvantage is that it is "chaotic", and there is no rule.
Later, I thought that there were too many people in the "picture above", and I heard that the Luwan District Library had been damaged very little during the "ten years", so I changed the door and went to "Lutu". I read almost all of Jack London's novels in Chinese and O. Henry's and Chekov's short stories in Lutu.
It is also pitiful that our generation does not have access to the classics that should have been read before the age of 16 until after the age of 25: Caesar's Gallic Wars, Aristotle's Poetics, Edward Younger's On Original Works......
Among them, Edward Younger's "On Original Works" (translated by Zha Liangzheng) enlightened me greatly, and the Chinese people at that time were still accustomed to "collective action", "collective thinking" and "collective feeling", so his cry of "individuality is everything" was like "a thunderstorm sweeping through the heavens" to us, and he wrote in such a very provocative way: "A person may not know his own ability, no less than an oyster does not know the pearl on his body, and a rock does not know the diamond in it; When a person may possess a latent and unperceived talent, the writer will be amazed when it is suddenly activated: like the brilliant aurora in the night, it makes people jaw-dropping, blissful and confused, and they dare not believe it......"
Young blood is close to the boiling point every day, often in the morning is still Li Yu's "Idle Love", in the afternoon it is already Longinus's "On the Sublime", and in the evening it is likely to be Jin Shengsi's Tang poems, or "How to Pickle Jinhua Ham", which is completely a kind of long-term belly swallowed alive, overeating without dietary guidelines, resulting in "indigestion", walking around at will on the river without lights, staying too long on the wonderful chapters and sentences of many famous books, and ignoring the ability to comprehensively analyze and plan the structure.
The worse situation may lie in the "truth that fame should be early to become famous" that I don't understand, I want to be perfect in everything, I want to be in place in one step, I am not satisfied with any of my works, I am so ambitious, I always feel that I am still young, and there is still a lot of time to squander, so that I often indulge in such a scene - pick up a famous book, first look at the author's chronology, if it is a poet, I will quickly see if he has become famous before the age of 30, if he becomes famous early, I will feel depressed and anxious; If he became famous late, he smiled and breathed a sigh of relief, reassuring that he had not yet reached his age. If you are a novelist, hurry up to see if his famous works are published around the age of 40.
At that time, I felt that 40 years old was a distant age, and 40 years old success was considered a "late bloomer", so I could use it to comfort myself again.
Because I was not yet 25 years old at that time, I couldn't keep my pen in tow. It wasn't until 1986 that he was accidentally dragged into a medical science magazine by an old friend because of the publication of a novella, "Rehabilitation" magazine, and finally engaged in full-time text editing.
I still have a lot of "after". Until the retirement of the position of the chief writer of "Xinmin Weekly", he wrote a lot of prose, he is a writer, but he is not a novelist, thinking about what his friend said, "it seems to be fruitful", it seems that the "simplified version" of the dream has not yet been realized? However, the dream has not been realized, and the process of striving for the dream is still very happy.
From this, Song Huizong suddenly came to mind. Only by "Hua Shigang" knew that he was a dreamy and lustful person, after being captured by Jin Bing, his biggest dream was only to return to China, but his "ninth brother" (ninth son) Zhao Gou did not welcome him even if he had the opportunity, and looked at his "Yanshan Pavilion - Northbound to See Apricot Blossoms" - "He Dream is also new and does not do", you can know that he is actually desperate. The homeland is far away, and you can only travel fugue. But lately, even dreams have been gone, and it's directly a kind of death.
The same is dreamless, in the Buddha and Lao Dan is the supreme realm; In ordinary people, it should be regarded as a frustration.
We are all human beings. May we all have dreams, and be brilliant.
Hu Zhanfen
Editor-in-charge: Xing Renyan