Smoke from the kitchen in the distance
mr roh
Living in the city for a long time, I often think of cooking smoke in the countryside. Quiet huts under the smoke, fruit-laden jujube and pomegranate trees, and leisurely chickens, ducks and sheep. I often think of my mother smoking in the kitchen.
As long as you have lived in the countryside, who doesn't miss the smoke curling over the village? Smoke from the kitchen chimney hovers behind the house, floats beside the bird's nest in the treetops, paces in the corner of the alley, and finally condenses into a hazy mist. In the warm haze, there is a mother's call, a grandmother's eyes and a father's Hong Zhong-like voice.
The memory of cooking smoke is a plot in one's heart, an epiphany after a big wave, and a calm life.
How long has it been since I saw a cigarette? There is no smoke from the kitchen in the city, but liquefied gas is used in the city. Even if there is a little kitchen smoke, it is a harmful gas and will not be missed. Besides, people in the city don't have time to pay attention to the smell of smoke in the kitchen, and everyone is in a hurry. Who has time to care about the fleeting kitchen smoke? Cooking smoke belongs only to the quiet countryside and the rich yellow land.
Only when you stop the pace of life, only when your heart is quiet and elegant, the smoke from the kitchen will rise from the distant memory and fill your whole heart instantly.
For people with rural life experience, cooking smoke is a delicious meal cooked by my mother when I was a child. Partners go to the fields outside the village in droves and play in the river at the head of the village. Get excited, forget time, forget to go home. At this time, I don't know who said that there was no smoke on my roof, and my mother had already cooked the meal. Everyone immediately turned their eyes to the village and looked for the roof of their home. Not long ago, the smoke in the kitchen has gradually dispersed, and my mother has cooked all the meals. Naturally, everyone got up the courage and ran to the village and ran back to their home, where delicious food was waiting. If you don't go home, mother will call her son at the village entrance.
Cooking smoke is the warmth in a man's heart. The sun is rising, and men are driving cows and pulling carts, talking and laughing and working in the fields outside the village. At noon, the men were tired, and the smoke in the village also rose. At this time, everyone unloaded the animals, sat down on the farm and lit a cigarette. Everyone's eyes will be on the road to the village. On that path, gradually, groups of women came out of the smoke in the village with food on their backs. The fatigue of men disappeared, and endless warmth came to my face.
Cooking smoke is the home of travelers. Whether it is in Tiannanhaibei or in Chenghuang Temple; No matter whether you are famous all over the world or rich, the smoke rising from the hut in your hometown must be the most attractive thing for you. No matter how serious your pain is, the wisps of smoke floating in the wind will hide you in boundless warmth in an instant.
When we think of our elderly mother, her figure is mostly in smoke. How many times? When we came home from the wild, our mother's figure was busy smoking in the kitchen. Where are our sisters? Their figures are beside the fire hole in front of the stove, with braids, filling the stove with corn and sorghum stalks, and their hands and noses have already turned black, like big faces for acting.
I suddenly remembered the word barren. A person must be a person fireworks, which means cooking smoke. People who travel in the loneliness of thousands of miles of desert and sail in the boundless sea will burst into tears when they suddenly see the smoke rising from the horizon, which is a sign of seeing the world. All the loneliness and desolation of the long lonely journey, all the fatigue and fear of the long journey, suddenly disappeared without a trace.
When there is no wind, kitchen smoke is a tree, which grows from the kitchen at home and then blends with the trees in the whole village to form a towering tree. It's different when it's windy. As soon as the smoke from the kitchen of every household rises to the roof, it quickly gathers into pieces of gray clouds, floats over the village and finally disappears in the endless wilderness. In fact, whether there is wind or no wind, the kitchen smoke over the countryside is a moving picture, flowing down like a waterfall, like colorful brocade, like a graceful girl, like an erratic haze. However, kitchen smoke is different from the picture scroll, because there is still wheat fragrance in kitchen smoke, which adds to the mother's eyes.
2、
Time in the dark
mr roh
Their names shine like the sun in the hall of human success today, but who knows how they spent those dark times before their success?
The Colombian writer Marquez, who is famous for One Hundred Years of Solitude, worked in a newspaper when he was young. Because he wrote a news article exposing the smuggling of the navy, he got burned, so he had to flee hastily and flee to Paris.
He was poor and alone, wandering in the slums of the Latin quarter of Paris. He has no job, no knowledge, no money, and what's worse, he doesn't know French. During the day, he went to the streets to pick up some empty wine bottles or old newspapers in exchange for a small amount of food to satisfy his hunger. Stay at a hotel called Flanders at night. He didn't have the money to pay the hotel deposit, so the owners of the hotel, Mr. and Mrs. Lacroix, reluctantly found him a storage room with a bed just placed under the stairs for him to stay temporarily. Mr and Mrs Lacroix are very kind people. They knew that Marquez couldn't afford the house payment at all, so they asked him to write a bad check and stay. Moreover, whenever the couple see Marquez go out for a long time but return empty-handed, they always give him a loaf of bread.
However, the Lacroix couple never imagined that this tramp, who was so down and out that he couldn't even eat or sleep, would be thinking about the great masterpiece "One Hundred Years of Solitude" in the stairwell they provided for free.
From 65438 to 0967, Marquez finished his "One Hundred Years of Solitude" during his wandering years in Paris. He became famous overnight.
One day, in a five-star hotel in Paris, Marquez suddenly remembered the Lacroix couple. He decided to pay back the house money he owed others for several years. When Marquez suddenly appeared in the Flanders Hotel in the Latin quarter, the Lacroix couple looked blank. They could not connect the gentleman in a suit and tie with the tramp who used to live in the stairwell. Marquez took great pains to persuade the kind couple to accept his debt.
1949 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Faulkner was born in such a place the size of a stamp, which is unbelievable! This is a very ordinary town in Mississippi in the southern United States, called Oxford.
If you visit Faulkner in a small town, you will naturally get great courtesy now. People in any small town will automatically become tour guides, take you to the cypress forest, tell you that Faulkner is the greatest American writer in the twentieth century, and tell you interesting stories about Faulkner tirelessly. However, before Faulkner became famous, this was not the case. When his novel The Temple was published, it swept the United States, but people in the small town didn't know that he had become a writer. A reporter who came all the way from new york to interview, in order to show his respect for the writer, specially went to the barber shop in the town for a haircut. He found out that the barber's surname was Faulkner, so he asked what was the relationship between the barber and william faulkner. As a result, the barber felt very embarrassed and said that the loafer was my nephew who failed to live up to expectations!
People in the small town think Faulkner has a reason. Before he became a writer, many things Faulkner did were really incredible. He first found a job distributing letters in a nearby university post office. As a result, he was very interested in stealing letters. He steals a lot of letters every day and throws them into the wastebasket after reading them. People naturally found out soon, so he was fired and lost his reputation in the small town. He began to think about how to restore his reputation and get ahead. He found it a good way to be a soldier. If he hangs out with a general, he will get all the fame. But because it was too short, it was brushed off during the physical examination. At this time, he was bent on becoming a general, so he ran to Canada without permission, and soon came back on crutches, saying that he joined the Royal Air Force there and fell off the plane and hurt his leg in the battle, becoming a hero. Although no one in the town believes his story, he still marches on the street with crutches every day. Later, he felt that it was meaningless to pretend that the lame man was a hero, so he threw away his crutch and began to fly in Oxford.
Faulkner, unwilling to be mediocre, finally moved towards silence and thinking. His figure disappeared from bars, idle crowds and Oxford Square. He returned to his home deep in the forest. With a pipe in his mouth, he wandered in the dense forest path during the day, looked up at the bright stars at night and eagerly read those excellent books. From then on, he rarely walked out of Berlin, and rarely walked out of the cabin. In the following time, he created a large number of novels reflecting the life and fate of whites, blacks and Indians in the southern United States, skillfully using stream of consciousness and symbolism, and created a precedent for American local novels. His works are still regarded as modern classics by western literary circles.
The writer called a knight by the world is undoubtedly Cervantes of Spain!
The first edition of Don Quixote was published in Spain on 1605, which immediately swept the country and was reprinted six times a year. The bestseller of this novel won the immortal honor for Cervantes. However, it is such a masterpiece handed down from ancient times, but it was completed when the author was imprisoned for hard labor. At this point, he is almost 60 years old.
Such an outstanding writer only went to middle school, and almost all his knowledge was acquired by hard self-study under difficult living conditions.
Cervantes was born in a poor family, and his father was a tramp surgeon. Because of the hard life, Cervantes and his seven brothers and sisters followed their father everywhere until 1566. His wandering childhood made him only receive secondary education. Although his father is a poor traveling doctor, his medical skills are superb. This doctor who travels all the year round is very experienced and deeply understands the importance of knowledge to a person. So when he treats some rich people with books, he borrows many books to take home for his son. Cervantes was very clever when he was a teenager and often surprised his father. In order to let his son read more books, he took his son with him when he met someone with books. He treats people in the house and lets his son read their books outside the door. When Cervantes was thirteen or fourteen years old, he was famous for reading the most in their small town. A lot of reading gave Cervantes the impulse and inspiration to create, and he slowly began to learn to write poetry. Soon, his poems spread all over their town, so that when his father went to see a doctor alone, people would ask him, "Ah, where is our poet?"
Cervantes likes literature very much. When he was in danger, selling literature was the only way for him to support his wife and children. He used literary language to advertise one businessman after another and one commodity after another. He wrote countless lyric poems and satirical poems, but most of them didn't arouse much response. He also wrote thirty or forty plays at the invitation of the theater, but it didn't achieve the expected success after being released. 1585 published the pastoral novel Galatia (the first part). Although the author is very satisfied with this, it has not attracted the attention of the literary world. While writing a book, he worked as a clerk in the government, worked as a quartermaster and tax collector, and was exposed to rural life and sent to the United States. He was arrested and imprisoned more than once, because he couldn't pay taxes, and some of them had accidents. In prison, Cervantes learned a lot about the life of the lower class and met all kinds of people. These experiences became the inexhaustible source of his creation of Don Quixote.
We are familiar with Balzac, a great French writer, who left us a brilliant artistic treasure house "Human Comedy", but he spent his whole life avoiding the fear of creditors, hiding in a shabby attic all day writing and publishing his own works, and the payment given by the publishing house was immediately taken away by creditors. If one day he can have hot meals and strong coffee, it will be a very luxurious life for him.
Van Gogh, the great Dutch painter, is even more pitiful. He only sold one painting in his life, and a little money is enough to buy a piece of brown bread and inferior tobacco. In the small town where he lives, he is synonymous with madness. He runs in the direction of the sun every day, and then draws the holiness and light in his heart in the room where the electricity is cut off because he can't pay the electricity bill, so we have the immortal work Sunflower.
There is also the great Kafka, who has never got rid of the humble position of the small staff of the industrial injury insurance company in his life. Galileo, a great scientist and thinker, finished his magnum opus Dialogue and Mathematical Expression on Two New Sciences in a prison in Rome.
Among all the great figures, their fates in life seem strikingly similar. Life is hard and poor. Looking up at these people who have been humiliated by life but reached the peak of human thought and art, I believe this sentence: God has given you wisdom, but at the same time it has also given you hardships. Only in hardships can wisdom shine.
3、
The taste of the city
mr roh
The architecture of a city in different periods constitutes the history of a city. Only the history of a city can solidify into the soul of a city. Only by completely retaining those buildings that marked the cultural and scientific level at that time or had special humanistic significance, the history of a city will last forever, and a city will always glow with the charm and brilliance of its soul.
There are many short streets and alleys in London, England. Although the city has developed rapidly in recent years, the construction department has been striving to maintain the ancient characteristics of these streets and lanes. Even if the streets are expanded and public facilities are built, they should be protected. These small streets are interconnected, and vehicles are not allowed to pass, only for pedestrians. Walking in these short streets, you can find not only those houses and shops with distinctive features, but also many small plaques hanging at the gates of streets, shops and houses, telling you which scientists, writers, artists or people who have made outstanding contributions to history have lived in this house and often walked and thought in this short alley.
Londoners say that some of these people are not very famous. For example, a painter named Jack painted in that small yard all his life and never became famous until his death. But Londoners believe that even this makes sense. The plaque at the gate of the courtyard reads: This is a painter who has devoted his life to art. Please don't disturb him. Londoners believe that commemorating such a painter is also of inestimable value to a community.
Watching Londoners so carefully protect these ancient and even dilapidated short streets and lanes, these ugly-looking small houses, a deep respect arises, which is London's culture, taste and profound heritage.
If you have the opportunity to go to Berlin, Germany, you will find yourself suddenly back more than a century ago, unconsciously walking on the streets of19th century, and you will sincerely sigh the long history and profound culture of this city. In fact, Berlin, as the capital, has a history of only 100 years. Before19th century, there were few buildings worth commemorating and preserving. But it is precisely because of their short history that they cherish what they have.
Since the end of 19, their successive governments have kept an archive list of historical sites. At the same time, it is stipulated that all buildings with a history of more than 80- 100 years are historical relics and must be unconditionally preserved. Even if the residential building without any features is demolished, it must be approved by the Minister of Urban Construction. In fact,/kloc-For more than 0/00 years, the historical buildings approved by successive construction ministers in Berlin are just ordinary houses that are about to collapse, which has no special significance. If a building with little value is about to collapse, the Minister of Construction will only approve the restoration funds. Construction companies and individuals in Berlin can only decorate and rebuild the interior of historic buildings, and the exterior of buildings can only be repaired and restored under the condition of retaining the original appearance.
We know that East Berlin and West Berlin have been separated for more than 50 years. In these 50 years, they have completely different ideologies and social systems, which determines their different ideas and methods in building cities. In fact, after more than 50 years of fragmentation, the urban appearance of East and West Berlin has been completely different. Now, how to unify them in one style, and whether to tear down all the buildings with the color of * * * in East Berlin is a rare historical witness: this is the characteristic of Berlin, and those buildings in East Berlin should be unconditionally preserved, even those ordinary residents.
The best example is Karl Marx Street, the most famous street in East Berlin. When it was completed, East Germany completely copied the model of Moscow, which was quite different from the whole architectural style of Berlin. However, decision makers in Berlin now think that it should be kept, because it can tell people more intuitively what the city of Berlin has experienced.
There is always room. This sentence is the creed and principle of the builders of Berlin in urban construction. To expand the city, their first thought is to find idle places and make use of them, instead of just staring at the built places and trying to rebuild them. Therefore, walking in the streets of Berlin, although sometimes you have to beat around the bush, you won't have any inconvenient thoughts, because you feel that you are not only on the road, but also visiting a huge historical exhibition hall, and you can't help thinking, what a city with a long history and what a tasteful city it is.
Montreal, Canada spared no effort to protect historical sites. When we visit this city, Mr. Mayor will proudly tell you that our city has a history of 400 years. /kloc-When Europeans first landed on the American continent in the 0/7th century, their ancestors built churches, schools, government offices, hospitals and houses with typical European characteristics, which were invisible in the United States. This will make us in China feel very ashamed. Choose any city in China, which is not thousands of years old? It's just that we don't regard history as a treasure and pride like others. I used to think that maybe our history is too long, so we don't know how to cherish it.
If a city has no history, it can't talk about culture and connotation, and it's easy to imagine its shallowness. A city without history will lose its soul and will.
In China, there were two famous debates a few years ago, one was Badaowan in Beijing and the other was Wanzhu Park in Jinan. Where is Badaowan? Lu Xun lived there for many years and many famous articles were written there. Where is Wanzhu Park? This is an ancient garden that has been preserved for hundreds of years, and there is a memorial hall in Li Kuchan. Beijing has been arguing for a long time about whether to keep Badaowan. Jinan simply stopped arguing and the bulldozer began to work. At that time, public opinion was in uproar, and the press, NPC deputies, CPPCC members and ordinary citizens called for the protection of Wanzhu Park. Later, news organizations at the central level joined in, and Wanzhu Park escaped the disaster.
Beijing has been arguing over the demolition of Cao Xueqin's former residence. Located in the city of Beijing, this mansion is the only former residence of Cao Xueqin recognized by Redology scholars. It not only has the research value of A Dream of Red Mansions, but also, as a typical quadrangle building in Qing Dynasty, is of great value to the study of urban dwellings in Beijing. However, some policy makers think it has no reserved value because it is not listed as a cultural relic protection unit at any level. Redology scholars pleaded everywhere, hoping to keep it. It is said that the decision maker's answer is that the quadrangle will be demolished and an ancient well in the quadrangle can be kept as a souvenir. What a ridiculous and sad thing it is. Since it is not a cultural relic, what's the point of keeping a well?
In Beijing, there is an alley called Beizongbu, which includes a courtyard No.24. More than 70 years ago, architect Liang Sicheng and his wife Lin once lived in this courtyard. Mrs. Living Room was famous for gathering literary celebrities, scholars and celebrities in the cultural circle in the 1930s. Recently, around the demolition and protection of Liang Sichenglin's former residence, cultural protection professionals, celebrities' families, folk and official cultural protection organizations launched a pen-and-ink war on the media platform. According to media reports, authorities revealed that Lin Liang's former residence has been identified as an immovable cultural relic. However, cultural protection officials accused the cultural protection department of failing to keep its promise. Later, Lin Liang's former residence was partially demolished. The gatehouse in the yard was empty, and a room was demolished in the middle of a row of main rooms, forming a hole with uneven gaps. Most of the three-story buildings in the hospital have been deserted on the first floor, which is very lonely. Xu Beihong's former residence is located in Panxi Mountain, Jiangbei, Chongqing. After the outbreak of War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, he and his wife lived here. But what we see now is that the old house is empty, full of rags, bottles, broken shoes, plastic bags and other rubbish everywhere, and wild dogs are barking and laughing wildly. Since 2007, the management unit said to restore Xu Beihong's former residence, but the plan has been changed several times and construction has not started. Now the former residence has been destroyed relatively quickly, and the Buddha statues and other cultural relics on the rockery in the garden have been removed.
If it is in places like London and Badaowan, Londoners will certainly hang a plaque saying, "Lu Xun is here to conceive his diary of a madman, please tread lightly", so that everyone who comes here will be in awe. Cultural relics of this level, like Cao Xueqin's former residence, have long been taken care of as national treasures in Britain and France.
If we come to Dante's former residence in Florence, Andersen's former residence in Copenhagen, Hugo's former residence in Paris, and the sloping and dim Van Gogh's former residence in Orville, a suburb of Paris, we will be ashamed of our ignorance of culture.
A city without history is an anemic city and a city with low taste; A city that doesn't know how to protect history is a city with no taste and no soul.