In the future, when winter comes, human beings will fondly miss a day called "Great Heat", miss the scorching sun, miss the inescapable heat that permeates every corner, and miss the use of minimal fabrics. Covering up shame, but never a hint of cold luxury.
The Great Heat means the power game between ice and fire. The God of Fire has gained absolute dominance. It means the struggle between Zhu Rong and the workers, and Zhu Rong wins again.
At this moment, green has spread to the northernmost tip of the northern hemisphere, and short-lived and gorgeous flowers have also bloomed in the wilderness near the Arctic.
At this moment, the hottest place on earth is the area of ??land where the sunlight was directly or nearly direct a month ago - the name of the North Temperate Zone does not live up to its name at the moment, and it is best to temporarily change its name to the North Tropical Zone.
At this moment, if the hills block the wind, the city gathers people, and humans display countless machines to support their own survival... Any such place has become a huge steamer or oven: Jinling stove, Chang'an cage, Hangzhou steaming, Changsha roasting...
However, with the advent of an artifact called air conditioner, Great Heat, a solar term that once made people talk about summer, just became a calendar item. A word has no special color or high temperature.
But in the past tens of millions of years, it was fire. The green eyes were like burning green flames, and the chirping of cicadas in the ears increased the sweltering heat and irritability. People used the Chinese character "summer" to express it vividly. Describe the original feeling about it.
The author writes in oracle bones
. It is actually a realistic representation of a hot pot: use wooden sticks and forks similar to chopsticks to take things out of the pot. If the emphasis is on cooking, then add "fire (灁)" below it, and it becomes "boil"; if the emphasis is on fishing, then add "bamboo (?)" above it, and it becomes "箸"; and If you add a sun to it, it means that the sun is shining on it and the big pot is cooking on it. This is "heat"! The word "summer" is added with the word "big", which means that it is already the limit that is not suitable for human survival!
Therefore, cooling off from the summer heat has become a compulsory task for ancient Chinese people.
The emperor, his concubines, and those wealthy and noble families built high-shaded and ventilated pavilions, and collected ice cubes and stored them in ice cellars in the winter. Putting on thin silk clothes, although in terms of coolness, it is still not as good as an ordinary modern home with air conditioning, but this feeling of being alone is far better than the coolness itself.
Ordinary officials, that is, literati trained by the imperial examination system, sat in the shade, waving their fans, temporarily putting aside the teachings of Confucius and Mencius, and using Taoist and Buddhist mental methods to resist even The wind blown by the fan is also very hot. I am afraid that only Li Bai could take off his clothes to escape the heat like Bai Ding, and also write it in a poem openly. Bai Juyi's "Sales of Summer" can be regarded as the "Heart Sutra for Escape from Summer" by most literati:
And the common people and all living beings still need to struggle for survival even in days like the Great Summer. During the hot summer season, early rice matures. In order to gain enough time to plant a season of late rice before frost, the harvesting of early rice and the transplanting of late rice are linked together, which has become a "double rush" season in the southern rice growing areas: early rice rushes to harvest, and late rice rushes to harvest. Seed. The bright sunshine every day is transformed into white rice on our table. Early rice (indica rice), which is not palatable, is a high-quality feed for raising chickens, ducks, geese, and even cattle and sheep. Therefore, eggs, milk, foie gras, these daily or luxurious foods may contain the sunshine of the mild and severe heat, and the sweat and hard work of farmers.
Greedily absorbing sunlight and transforming it into fresh and sweet food, as well as corn, apples, grapes, citrus...
The noise of cicadas still lingers, and fireflies become With a romantic and warm but hard-to-find surprise, the lotus does not understand the muddy and unstained sentences, but blooms so beautifully...Things that are so poetic to humans are actually just inseparable to themselves. Looking for opportunities to reproduce. Therefore, the cicada is the tenor who has been silent for too long and is too eager to woo a mate with his singing; the lotus is the newlywed who summons the matchmaker with color and gives nectar to the matchmaker; and the fireflies light up themselves in the long night, using The glimmer of light beckons suitors to each other.
Mosquitoes, flies, bullies, mayflies...each of them has its own joys and sorrows, love and hatred. Without feathers and clothes to protect them from the cold, and without warehouses or food storage, the Great Heat is a carnival where they have to venture out to hunt and court mates. Therefore, every bug we kill is an interruption in the narrative of the universe - but the grand epic of the universe is still being written every day without direction.