During the Qianlong period, Ji Xiaolan and gifted scholars and great scholars learned a lot and memorized a lot of knowledge. He once said that he never left Four Treasures of the Study from the age of four to his later years. Ji Xiaolan wrote a self-elegy before he died. Lian Yue:? The official sea rises and falls as a gull, and the book of life and death is like a moth. ? The first couplet refers to the ups and downs of officialdom, just like a seagull, depicting the hardships of official career. The second couplet means that he is immersed in the book, like a moth to a fire, born and died in the book, expressing his lament for his fate. We can see that Ji Xiaolan is tired of officialdom, which also includes Ji Xiaolan's understanding of his life.
Zuo was an important minister in the late Qing Dynasty and made outstanding achievements in his life. At the age of 27, because of his serious illness, he made a pair of self-ties: if he rides a whale westward today, he will be seven feet tall and withered, and his blood will be scattered in the empty forest. Who will sing, drum a good pipa, hang a sword, lament the dead wood and autumn soul, make me excited for a long time, and even let the loess bury me, I should call a male ghost; May the crane return to the east today, with one petal of incense to the best of my nature and three bodies to show my golden body. I would like to use this as firewood for fishing, traveling on land, reading water gulls and entertaining myself for half a life. I am afraid that God will be kind to me and work hard. ? As can be seen from this couplet, Zuo has been ambitious and open-minded since he was young.
Chen Yinque, a master of history, was persecuted during the ten-year Cultural Revolution. He felt sorry for his 80-year-old man. Although he was very ill, he was still doomed. Trapped in a cage, he felt that he was dying, so he wrote a pair of self-elegies and gave them to his wife. Crying has become a history of heartbroken for 30 years; A leopard cannot change his spots, Jiuquan treats people with dry eyes! ? The first part means, in the face of being beaten? Ghosts and monsters? I was imprisoned, brutally criticized many times, and the clothes I wore were full of insults to my personality. Ghosts and monsters? The four-word prison uniform can't help but make people sad. The second couplet means that it is difficult to live with a sick body. As husband and wife, we can only meet again under the grave. I can't help but sigh.
The elegy of Zhang Yuanji, a famous publisher, is the easiest to understand. Zhang Yuanji was a scholar in Guangxu period, who was a minister of punishments and a secretariat of Zhang Jing. E * * method? Later, he presided over the Commercial Press in Shanghai and was elected as a representative of the National People's Congress after liberation. When he was in his eighties, he carried a kind of? Busy? In a word, I summed up the ups and downs of most of my life. I am glad that my old age will be prosperous, so I tied myself to the cloud. What a smelly bag! I've been working for you for 90 years, and now I have to hand it in. In this new world, even if I don't live to be 100 years old, I will see peace. ? This vivid and interesting self-attachment sweeps away the sad mood, which fully shows Zhang Yuanji's totally different attitudes and feelings towards the old and new systems and the two societies.
From this point of view, the literati's self-attachment, whether it is laughing and cursing, cynicism or dance academy, is a kind of mentality they express in the face of death. They are different from the tedious secularity of suicide notes and the praise of epitaphs to others, but poetic expressions in the face of death. I think this should be enlightening and inspiring for our future generations.