The poet North Island has a poem:
I'm not familiar with this world
That's not why I'm desperate
I still have a lot of passion
To part, to death, to yesterday, to silence
People are thrown into the world, thrown into the crowd, and we try to fit in with the world, only to find that for the world, we are always thrown in.
We try to fit in, only to find that there is a terrible gulf between people, and that is that people simply cannot understand each other.
Just as we understand the world, by virtue of our own memories, we are only a combination of certain memories, a combination of certain ideas, in the eyes of others.
Regarding memory, Milan Kundera says in "Ignorance":
It retains only a pitiful fraction of the past, and no one knows why it is precisely this part and not the other that remains, and this choice, in each of us, is mysteriously carried out, beyond our will and our interests, we will not be able to comprehend human life, and if we try to send out the most obvious truth: the fact that it existed no longer exists, and its restoration is impossible.So, life is really just your own and has nothing to do with others. We are ignorant of others, and others are also ignorant of us, and many of life's troubles are because of this ignorance.
Elaine was born in Prague, but twenty years ago, when the country was in turmoil, Elaine became an exile and went to live in France.
During the first weeks of her exile, Elaine often had strange dreams from which she often woke up, as her husband and exile would do.
Later, Elaine discovered that all exiles would have such dreams, without exception.
As exiles, they became strangers, longing for their homeland, but everything in their homeland terrified them.
For twenty years, she has worked and lived here, and she has come to consider herself French.
But now, the Czech Revolution is going on, and the great change has come, Elaine realizes that in the eyes of the French, she has always been an exile, not a Frenchman.
In their view, return is the best destination for exiles.
Elaine's friend Silvi confronted her:
Why are you still here?When she said this, she was a little angry, as if it was a sin for Elaine to stay here, Elaina asked rhetorically
So what should I be at**?Silvi said
in your home.In Silvi's eyes, Elaine's home is in Prague, and just like that, Elaine saw the words 'Great Return' engraved in her heart.
In front of her eyes, the books she had read in the past, the movies she had watched, and the memories were replayed one by one, as if everything was urging her to return.
The Great Return, like a spell, is imprinted on Elaina, and to outsiders, it seems to be a mission for an exile to return to the embrace of the motherland and witness a great history at a time when the motherland is changing.
However, these people don't know that for Elaine, she has been gone for twenty years, and for twenty years, things are not people, maybe things are not people, and Elaina's heart is full of fear and unease.
However, outsiders do not understand and do not know.
Many times, people can't understand it, but they always hurt and blame each other.
A few years before the arrival of the Great Return, Elaina's mother who was far away in her homeland was widowed, and because she was retired and too old to hurt anyone, she obtained a visa to go out.
The mother decided to go to Paris to visit her daughter secretly.
During that time, Elaine mobilized all her sense of reason and morality, and made herself act like a faithful daughter, she took her mother to see the grandeur of Paris and appreciate the art of Paris, but her mother still lived in her own memory and was not interested in everything that Elaine took her to see.
She didn't care about her daughter's life, she just talked about everything in her life, and sometimes, Elaine tried to interject and wanted to talk about her life in France, but her mother was so talkative that she had no room to interject.
Elaine discovers that her mother is still the same mother, who cares for her son in every way, but ignores her daughter, sees her daughter's vulnerability as indifference, laziness and carelessness, and constantly reprimands her daughter.
For a long time, Elaine always felt that she was not beautiful enough and not smart enough in front of her mother, and her mother's few days in Paris allowed these feelings of weakness and subordination to others to land on her again.
Before her mother left, she introduced her boyfriend, Gustav, to her.
After her mother left, Elaine walked to the window alone, feeling that she had regained her tranquility and enjoyed the freedom of being alone.
For a long time, she had long felt that exile was a misfortune, and now she began to wonder if she was right.
Perhaps, going into exile abroad is the beginning of her breaking away from her mother's control and getting rid of the past, which is the best way out of her life.
But now, the Great Return has arrived, and everyone wants her to go back.
Her boyfriend, Gustav, told her that he had proposed to the company to open an office in Prague.
He said:
I'm so glad to finally be able to get in touch with your city.Elaine tells him that Paris is her city, and that she is happy to be with Gustav and cut off contact with other people.
However, Gustav felt that Elaine wanted to go back, but was only worried that someone would spy on her past.
Kundera said
The longer we are abandoned, the more irresistible the voices calling us back.In fact, people often judge others so easily because they don't understand.
Elaina returned to Prague, however, she was not Xi to everything here.
And many things in front of her reminded her of the distant past, and everything reminded her of the horror of return.
She suddenly realized that her life, the essence of her life, her career, her wealth, was not here, she looked through the previous address book, stared at the almost forgotten names on it, and then, she booked a private room, intending to get together with her friends.
In France, she brought fine wines, but her friends liked beer, and there was already a great gap between her and her friends, and her foreigners' living Xi and her wealth were incompatible with them.
She was not Xi to everything.
Is this kind of return really right?
Her friends, however, raised their glasses:
Cheers to Elaina's return.She couldn't understand them, they couldn't understand her, they drank together, but they didn't understand each other, it was a ritual, a ritual that declared her integration into them, and yet, it came at the cost of twenty years of her life.
Then one day, at the airport, Elaine passed through security and sat down in the departure hall, where she recognized a man sitting across from her.
Elaine asked in Czech
We know each other, do you remember me?The other party said:
Of course.They chatted together, passing the time of waiting, and Elaine remembered that he was her friend in the bar in Prague all those years ago, and he had been staring at her with his eyes.
Her love story ended before it even began, and she regretted that it was a wound that never healed.
What kind of revelation is it to meet again now?
Before parting, the man left the name of the hotel where he was going to stay, and the man was Joseph.
However, Elaine didn't know that Joseph couldn't remember the other party at all about this woman who took the initiative to talk to her, so he felt quite embarrassed.
People always grasp certain memories and grasp one ten-millionth of life, so half of people live in memory and half in imagination, and many things in life have nothing to do with facts.
Joseph, also as an exile, returned to his homeland again, and when he returned home, he also found himself in an embarrassing situation.
He went to his brother's house, and the two looked at each other, not knowing what to look for in each other's faces, and the brother said
All the people who went abroad have returned, at least they have come back to have their photographs.Joseph looked at his dearest people, at his sister-in-law, but he thought that if he had been on the street, he would not have recognized them, and that there was only pity and sorrow left in the memory of the past.
His brother and sister-in-law couldn't understand him, because he had left his hometown so decisively, far away from a foreign country, and he decided to leave, not because he couldn't live in his hometown, but he was free, he said to himself, there is only one life, and he wants to live elsewhere.
Abroad, he got married, but his wife later died, and she told him that he should return to his homeland.
At this moment, in the face of this overwhelmed everything, Joseph felt angry, and his wife's face appeared in front of him again, and he said to himself:
It's all your fault, you said I should be here, I didn't want to come.He opened the diary, which contained his youth and his secret thoughts, and after reading it, he tore up the pages of the diary.
The ** of the hotel sounded, and he thought of the woman at the airport, but as soon as he heard the voice, he knew that it was not the other party, it was a woman with a greasy voice and a nasal voice.
Elaina's ** finally called, Joseph said:
Finally called.Elaine said:
Finally, I'm so happy to hear your voice, you're waiting for my **?Joseph jokingly said, I'm in a hurry, just now I was in a bad mood, and when I heard your voice, everything was fine, not only that, but he also said half-truthfully
I wish you were by my side right now, and stayed here with me.Elaine asked him
Can I see you before you go?Joseph said:
Yes, you will see me.Ever since she met Joseph at the airport, Elaine had only thought about him, and she kept recalling the brief encounter and the love that had not had time to grow.
People are always easy to be trapped by memories, so life is very heavy, we carry the memories of the past, staggering towards the future, but always ignore that time has passed, many things have changed.
Even, many things are just imagined by us from our memories, love and hate.
Joseph loved his wife very much, and when she died, he even wanted to go with her, but he did not die, not because he feared for his life, but because he could not tolerate leaving his beloved body to strangers to be left to be manipulated.
He felt that if he also died, there would be no one to protect his dead wife.
When he returned home, he didn't even tell his brother and sister-in-law about it, because the dead man couldn't protect himself, and Joseph wanted to protect her.
After the death of his wife, Joseph found that there was no conversation, and the whispers of his past life were getting weaker and weaker.
One day, he asked himself:
If the sporadic memories of their lives together were added up, how much time would there be?A minute?Two minutes?He realized that it would be extremely short-lived, and that it would become more and more difficult to fathom with his wife's death.
Because for the future, everyone can make mistakes, and people can only be sure of the present.
For example, when he met Elaina, Joseph could not have expected it.
They agreed to meet at a time, and before meeting, Elaina was full of expectations, and even the ** in anticipation was full of poetry.
When the time finally came, Elaine went to wait for Joseph in advance, and when we met, she asked
Are you happy here?Would you like to stay?Joseph said:
No, I don't want to.It's nice that they think the same thing, there is nothing to be nostalgic about this place, she talks about her experience in Prague
They talked to me about people and things I didn't know, and they didn't want to believe that after so long, their world had long since disappeared from my mind, and I had forgotten what they used to be, and they weren't interested in what I was now.But Joseph told her:
It's normal for people to not be interested in each other.Elaina continued:
They are interested in us as living evidence of their ideas.They talked very speculatively, as if they had found a confidant, a spiritual confidant, as if they had met their kind, the same kind of lonely soul.
Man is a very strange creature, sometimes if you understand a little, you feel that you are understood completely, and sometimes if you don't understand a little, you feel that everything is not understood.
Joseph and Elaine were in the room, drinking and chatting.
The tacit understanding between them was thorough, which made them extremely excited, and then they started**.
Elaina felt that everything she could achieve now was something she had to try to achieve, and everything that could not be achieved, she imagined it aloud.
And Joseph knew from the bottom of his heart that this ** was his last**, maybe this was a desire, as if he wanted to condense all the past glamorous histories and glamorous histories that would no longer exist.
So, their love was unusually intense, because of the addition of imaginary liquor.
However, when he was still **, Joseph was secretly looking at his watch, he was about to leave, everything was a countdown, and at this time, he didn't remember who this woman was with him.
Elaina pulls out what he left behind when they first met, but he doesn't respond, and she understands that this man doesn't know who she is.
She became excited:
You deceived a strange woman, and you and the strange woman who took the initiative to send it to the door** was obviously a misunderstanding, but you abused it.Elaina understood everything, she wanted to escape, to run away, to a place where life manifested itself completely differently from here.
She cried bitterly and fell asleep, and he had quietly left, and when she woke up, she saw his message:
Room you can use until noon.Ignorance, everything is ignorant, the love she thought was just a misunderstanding, an ignorant misunderstanding, because she didn't know, so it was beautified.
Socrates has a saying that probably says:
Ignorance is the greatest sin in the world.A lot of happiness in life is because of ignorance, and the troubles of life are also because of ignorance, and everyone who lives in this world is actually very ignorant, because compared to the infinite universe, one person can know too little.
For the world, for the most part we are ignorant, for the future, we don't know what will happen, everything is unknown.
However, in this world, people are learning how to Xi how to live better with what they know, although many times it backfires, but everyone works hard, and this is where the hope lies.
Kundera saidOne never knows what one wants because one can only live once, and one cannot compare it with a previous life or correct it in the next.
I think that life is really like this, so people should also know what they want and be determined to be themselves, Elaine, under the pressure of the Great Comeback, returned to Prague, only to find that everything had changed, and everything that followed.
This is Kundera's exploration of this theme, for the exile, he is an exile abroad, but when he returns to his homeland, he is greeted by everything that is strange, no place is his home, one is his hometown, but it is also a strange land, the other is the place where he lives in exile, but he can only be regarded as an exile.
For everything that happened in her hometown, Elaina is incomprehensible and "ignorant", and the people of her hometown are also "ignorant" about Elaina.
Between people, after the slightest understanding, there is a boundless unknown.
After the unknown, or the unknown, everything is unknown, and the fun and happiness of life are also in this unknown.
If you want to be troubled, you have to be troubled.
If you want to be happy, you have to be happy.
May you, seek kindness, and live up to this life.