I wrote some monographs on history many years ago. I remember that several reporters in the newspaper said that I wrote books easily and smartly, but it was not the case at all. This is a hard job for me, and I feel that my age has increased dramatically as soon as I start writing. Whether it is great sorrow in the Spring and Autumn Period or great joy, great sorrow and indignation, we should finally close our eyes and meditate and return to the indifference of history and the severity of reason. As a result, the pen was also full of correctness, which made many readers at home and abroad think that I was a white-haired old man.
I think that any truly civilized person will live a life of overlapping ages consciously or unconsciously. Without this kind of overlap, life will lose its elasticity and become dry and fragile easily. However, at different ages, I often fight in my heart, which sometimes makes me very upset. For example, after being buried by brick-like classics for several months in a row, my feet used to running on mountain roads will resist silently since I was a child. Then, my eyes will be full of eyes and my ears will suddenly release my desire for the sky and the earth. I know, this is another era different from the desk era. There are also many external temptations that contribute to this trouble. You can see a ready-made example before you. Richard Schechner, a famous professor at new york University, is twenty years older than me, but he ventured to many ethnic minority areas in southwest China. When he returned to Shanghai, he was still tireless. When he visited the City God Temple, he rode a horse in the crowd like an urchin, took off his hands and sang loudly! That day, he gave me a strange new book, which was written by him and his youngest son who was still in elementary school. Father and son talked about penguins in the Antarctic and made up one fairy tale after another. I put this book in his thick stack of internationally famous academic works, studied it for a long time, and couldn't help laughing at myself.
Even when reading China's ancient book binding, we will find that many of our predecessors are far more free and easy than we thought. Su Dongpo once called this kind of energy "young people who talked for a long time". Look at him holding the hound in his left hand, the eagle in his right hand and the cheerful horseshoe running. In fact, in detail, he called himself an "old man" when he was less than forty years old, so he was enjoying old age, middle age and youth at the same time, and his life was turned upside down and full of flavor.
Why do we people become so monotonous and embarrassed when we do a little study? If the promotion of every kind of knowledge is at the expense of the decline of life, what is the ultimate goal of secular knowledge? If brilliant knowledge civilization always brings such a heavy burden to people, then in another thousand years, will mankind not be submerged by its own spiritual achievements? If spirit and body are always contradictory, depth and youth are always out of reach, and knowledge and games are always opposite, then when can we care about the self-improvement that human beings have longed for since ancient times?
I stood up in this confusion, left my desk, put on the clothes of long-distance love, and pushed open the door of the study. San Mao, who used to walk long distances, sang, "How far is it? Please tell me! " No one can tell me, I set off quietly.
Of course, I won't go to the travel agency. The tourist team lined up with flags can't get where I want to go. It is best to travel alone, but it is difficult to do it here and now: Li Bai can't hire a canoe or a donkey for land travel, and I can't cross the mountains that seem modern and non-modern, and are linked by congestion and slack. Of course, the most convenient thing is to always attend various "seminars" held in turn all over the country, because the basic nature of such meetings is to provide a few people with opportunities to become famous, and at the same time, to provide many people with free travel. Unfortunately, such travel is boring because of noise. Fortunately, there are many invitations to give lectures in various places on weekdays. I always thought that the lecture was just repeating the completed thinking, and it took too much time to go out to give lectures, so I declined. At this time, I thought, why not travel with lectures? With the reception unit, many annoying troubles will be solved with the help of others, and there is nothing to make a fuss about seminar travel. So I sorted out those invitations, opened the map and began to study the route. I laugh at myself, and I will become a wandering artist who makes a living by selling art.
In this way, I chatted all the way, and there were many places to go. I can't elaborate on my experiences and feelings during my trip. Anyway, when I arrived at a hotel in Gansu, I felt I had to write some articles.
The reason is that I find that the places I particularly want to go to are always places where ancient culture and literati have left deep footprints, which shows that the landscape in my heart is not entirely a natural landscape, but a "human landscape". This is the long-standing charm of China's history and culture and its long-term influence on me, and I can't get rid of it. Everywhere I go, there is always a heavy historical pressure hanging over my whole body, which makes me inexplicably moved and sighed. I often stand like a fool, sometimes full of chapters and sentences, sometimes full of blanks. I stand in the direction that the ancients must have stood, looking at the natural landscape that rarely changes with black eyes similar to those of my ancestors, and listening to the sounds of the wind and birds that are no different from those of thousands of years ago. I thought that there were many libraries collecting ancient books and universities teaching ancient culture in the big city where I lived, but the real pace of China culture fell on this vast and desolate land. The earth is silent, as long as one or two shrewd literati come forward, its long-standing cultural connotation will be vigorously rushed out; Scholars are also weak. As long as you are wrapped in this rush, you can breathe for thousands of years. So, in this seemingly ordinary moment of standing, people, history and nature blend together in chaos, so I have the impulse to write an article. I have expected that what I am going to write will be some strange articles with no unified style and no genre. Unexpectedly, I traveled to regain my youthful vitality, but when I put pen to paper, it looked older than any article I had written in the past.
In fact, this is not surprising. Passion for history will always turn into helplessness for history. Bacon said that history makes people wise, that is, history can tell us all kinds of impossibilities, and point out the sobering and frustrating points in time and space coordinates. I don't know the heroism of young people with little resource endowment, but this is based on the premise that they haven't realized their historical position. Once they realize this, a large part of their heroism will disappear. When people grow older and are surrounded by the stability of interpersonal relationships, languages, occupations and many other orientations, they finally have to be like the couple in the golden pond, no longer expecting to migrate and let the grass grow. This is old.
So I thought about walking, dark and thin, so that the smoke of the Tang Dynasty and the wind of the Song Dynasty washed away the last bit of vitality, and fell wearily on the small table of the border hotel, and then asked passers-by where the mailbox was and sent away what I had just written. Sending an article about traveling and going abroad is the same, and it has become a column in the current Harvest and books. I remember at the end of the column, I apologized to the readers with great fear and disturbed them to accompany me on a long and unpleasant journey.
Of course, things also have a more optimistic side. If you really go far and watch too much, you will also have some unexpected ideas, just as we can always find many places to discuss when watching ants move from a height. After all, there are still some options for various orientations in the world. Perhaps, it is the tolerance of this selectivity that ultimately determines a person's psychological age, or a little older, and determines the life potential and renewal possibility of a culture and a period of history.
History tells us all kinds of orientations, and also tells us that any orientation is not innate, and it is the result of previous choices. Even my hometown is just a stop in the long-distance wandering of my ancestors. From choice to difficult choice, so staying is a kind of helplessness; However, no matter how big the helplessness is, it will not stop future generations from choosing. Therefore, people will always find and abandon their homes, become strangers forever, and find their own way again and again from the helpless stay and start over.
I abandoned all my sadness and doubts to chase the homeless tide, because the eternal stranger was calling me, and he was coming along this road.
Tagore: Fruit Collection
Based on this, some comments on cultural trends have also appeared in my works.
I can't help being old, but I may still be young. I dare not pray for our huge culture, but I hope my words can have a bitter aftertaste, anxious comprehension, relaxed meditation and a young age.
Of course, hope is just hope. Besides, it is really extravagant hope. (199 1 spring)