Before Su Dongpo came to Huangzhou, he was caught in a lawsuit called "Wutai Poetry Prison" by literary historians. After that, he came out of prison, was detained and stayed away from his family. He was not qualified to choose any place outside Huangzhou and walked towards this desolate town at that time.
He doesn't know that at this moment, he has completed a cultural breakthrough that will go down in history forever. His masterpieces written in Huangzhou not only declared that Huangzhou had entered a new aesthetic level, but also declared that Su Dongpo had entered a new life stage.
I like reading the biography of Su Dongpo by Mr. Lin Yutang very much, but I always feel that Mr. Yu Tang has written Su Dongpo's situation and mentality in Huangzhou too well. Mr. Yutang loves Su Dongpo's Huangzhou poems, so he uses poetry to render them, and uses passion to render them elegant and holy. In fact, as far as I know, Su Dongpo is still very painful in Huangzhou. His beautiful poems are a struggle and transcendence of bitterness.
Su Dongpo's life in Huangzhou has been described clearly in a letter he wrote to Li Duanshu. The letter said:
Since I committed the crime, I have been deeply blocked. I have been swimming in a boat, and I have been accused of being intoxicating and gradually unaware of it. I have never seen a word of my friends and relatives in my life, nor have I answered a book with them. I'm glad I survived.
I was shocked when I first read this passage, because everyone knows that Su Dongpo, a cheerful celebrity, has many friends. Day-to-day entertainment and endless chorus have almost become the basic content of his life, and he lives for his friends half the time. However, once something happens, friends not only don't write, but also don't reply.
They all know that Su Dongpo was wronged. Now that things have largely passed, they don't even want to write a sentence or two about their daily life. Su Dongpo's letters, written with wonderful pen and ink, have illuminated the history of calligraphy in China. They were painstakingly taken out from Huangzhou, but they could not get back any information of friendship.
I believe these friends are not bad people, but it is precisely because they are not bad people that I deeply sigh. In a word, the original world collapsed around us, so a generation of celebrities hung out among woodcutters and fishermen without being known. It was probably easy, but he felt that there were countless pairs of eyes staring at him in the distance. For the time being, he can't feel that the world has a very warm response to his poems, and he can only be scared in loneliness.
Even though the letter was unimportant, he specifically said not to show it to others. In daily life, before my family came to pick me up, I mostly slept during the day, went out for a walk alone at night, and drank a cup when I saw the faint local wine, but I never drank too much for fear of making a fool of myself after getting drunk.
Appreciation of works:
Su Dongpo was jealous of his talent, forced to confess and bound by a villain, but he sang, "No one can succeed casually without going through the storm." After this difficult experience, his vitality gradually became tenacious. At the beginning of the trial, he "tried to talk back with some normal logic", and later "couldn't stand the confession" and was bent on dying.
Finally, he was released to Huangzhou, where he lived a miserable and lonely life. Although he "can only be scared in loneliness", resulting in "unspeakable loneliness", at the same time, his predicament tempered him to "reflect on the past in loneliness", talk with mountains and rivers, talk with the ancients, and March into the literary world, making him a "great writer" in the history of literature, completing his spiritual breakthrough and achieving the breakthrough of Yu Su Dongpo.
A bad scholar and a great poet, like a mirror, reflect so many monsters and so many ugly souls at once, which sets off the good character of the slandered person.