Classical literature seems to be a distant dream from our today’s life, today’s language, and today’s writing. In fact, today is the continuation of yesterday, and today has a very close internal connection with yesterday.
In particular, our Chinese nation is a country that values ??cultural inheritance. Thousands of years of historical accumulation have given Chinese culture a rich heritage, and thus the characters we still use today have this cultural heritage. If, as a writer, you only understand its superficial grammatical meaning but cannot feel its connotation of emotional color and humanistic allusions, you will not be able to use it accurately and vividly.
Today's various literary phenomena are, by their very nature, within the genes of classical culture, and are amplifications or recombinations of certain classical cultural phenomena.
For example, the pursuit of incomprehensibility, obscurity, and haziness in modern poetry is actually not new. This was the trend in the late Tang Dynasty, the Five Dynasties, and the early Song Dynasty. Generally speaking, after a long period of popularization, the history of poetry became popular. It is necessary to move toward obscurity in order to meet the requirements of literature and defamiliarization. But after all, difficulty and obscurity are variations of literature and not the right path. After completing its mission in a specific historical period, the history of poetry must return to the normal path of simplicity. It is not the primitive simplicity, but the realm of "plain but high mountains and deep waters" and "achievement is easy but difficult".
Some people have described the scene in 2050. Human beings have become machine-like animals, and all material needs can be realized at the push of a button. There are no poets and no novels, because Everyone is busy making more money and buying more modern life, but in the spiritual and cultural field, it is a desert.
This is actually just an interpretation based on the current prosperity of utilitarian culture. Human beings will not be destroyed in the civilization they created, because human spiritual needs are the needs of human life itself.
China’s most precious wealth is China’s traditional culture and aesthetic cultural spirit. No matter what kind of scientific and technological civilization, others can imitate and surpass it. Therefore, it cannot be said to be China’s century, only It is understood that China's traditional cultural spirit will become the mainstream of human spiritual culture in the 21st century, and thus make the 21st century a century of Chinese traditional culture.
Tradition does not only refer to ancient times. Tradition is a category that is constantly changing. Reality and history are the same life. In particular, Chinese traditional culture has been an endless river from ancient times to the present. life.
Li Bai, Du Fu, Cao Xueqin are traditional, Lu Xun, Hu Shi and Shen Congwen are also traditional, although they are all anti-traditional masters. The blood of the Chinese nation surges in them, and they possess Chinese cultural genes that are difficult to eradicate. They all have extremely profound foundations in traditional culture, and their wounds constitute a new life for traditional culture through anti-tradition, which is a mutation of classical culture.
In the history of traditional Chinese culture, there have been several major deconstructions. The style of the Wei and Jin Dynasties deconstructed the orthodox Confucian culture of the Han Dynasty; the sexual liberation of Song poetry represented by Liu Yong; the humanistic trend of thought in the late Ming Dynasty represented by Li Zhi and the May Fourth Movement represented by Lu Xun are consistent. They all activated new vitality for tradition. They were first the masters of tradition, and then the deconstructors. But we cannot say that they are not part of traditional culture.
Every major deconstruction involves both the stimulation of external forces and the role of internal laws of movement. The May 4th Movement is not only the inevitable result of the westward spread of modern civilization from the east, but also the inevitable change of traditional Chinese culture. When traditional culture reaches a certain stage of development, it becomes an overripe and moldy fruit. It needs to be deconstructed to let the fruit fall to the ground, grow new fruit trees, and start a new life. The traditional culture of the late Qing Dynasty was more mature than that of the late Ming Dynasty, the early Song Dynasty, and the Wei and Jin Dynasties. Therefore, the need for its deconstruction was more urgent and the intensity of deconstruction was more powerful. Therefore, the May Fourth Movement destroyed this moldy fruit. Falling is a meritorious and inevitable result of the inherent operating laws of traditional culture.
However, after knocking down the fruits of traditional culture, it would be excessive to uproot the big tree cultivated by thousands of years of traditional culture. The result of excessiveness is to oppose tradition. culture, to those who oppose this culture - intellectuals.
Social trends have changed from the original supremacy of reading, which made the scholar-bureaucrat culture famous in one fell swoop, to the dislocation of social and ethical relations where the brain and body are upside down, the imbalance of the status of social sciences and natural sciences, etc. These are still the various shortcomings of today's society. crux.
Therefore, within Chinese culture, there is a mission to return to traditional culture. The meaning of return is not to restore the imperial examination system, to use classical poetry as the main literary carrier again, etc. Instead, we will build a new Chinese cultural system based on the spirit of traditional culture. This system will be modern culture that incorporates traditional culture.
Regression is not retrogression. For example, Confucius advocated the return to Zhou culture, but became the founder of feudal culture; Han Yu advocated the ancient prose movement, but became the pioneer of the emerging prose style of single-line prose. Humanity Always moving forward by looking back, making progress by denying current trends and returning to tradition.
Finally, I want to ask: Who did Chinese traditional culture recruit? If we don’t revitalize Chinese traditional culture now, when will we do it? Everyone, think about it carefully, if we really lose it, what else can we have to prove that we are Chinese! ! !