Let me start with the famous Lin Huiyin living room.
In January 1949, during Shen Congwen's "mental disorder", Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin took him to Tsinghua Garden for the New Year.
This Chinese New Year's Eve meal Shen Congwen ate quite bitterly.
At this time, the liberation of Peking was imminent, and the laughter and debate of the people present were all carried out in the sense of "liberation".
Only Shen Congwen was listening to the sound of cannons outside the window, imagining the mourning of the unknown soldier. There was a religious atmosphere in the living room, everyone was "believing" in something, and he was a man who "I think, therefore I am", if he did not think, there was no more, and a silent, shy, humiliated seventeen-year-old personality was left under a smile.
He said that Lin Huiyin's sensitivity was not aware of it. Is Lin Huiyin really undetectable? Lin Huiyin's living room has always been Shen Congwen's refuge.
Twenty years ago, Shen Congwen immediately complained to Lin as soon as he was depressed, crying like a child, and received her mother's sympathy and warm comfort.
This time, she reproached with concern: "You are thinking of 'you', why don't you write about 'people' with a pen, write about the growth of a new person, and the epic of the people's era?" Do you have the right to die at this time? He smiled.
In this living room, he repeatedly thought of the desperate Chinese New Year's Eve thirty years ago, and the only stranger who helped him was an old man selling kerosene on the street at dusk, who had lent him two hundred coppers to get him through the year, and this kindness turned into the eternal tenderness in his literature, "This is the old grandfather of 'Border City', I let him serve people for fifty years." ”
There are people who sympathize with the poor, but there is no one to talk about the sorrow. The old fisherman is gone.
He said, "I could only see the lights on the other side, and the ship was slowly sinking, without stopping, gradually sinking in the process." Abandon ship! Work hard. I have done it, Shen Congwen has also done it, didn't he follow the trend of the times and also wrote "Old Comrade"?
Although he already knew the result, "It's all over when you write it like this, and it's all over if you don't write it like this." ”
One dead end, no, two dead ends. The real despair is very calm, and there is no anger at all.
It was in this mood that I read Shen Congwen. Sitting in the same living room, when Liang Lin was talking about how to design the new collective houses for thousands of workers in the future, and how to look at the big chimneys of the factory, I followed his gaze, with the strange calm of the people on the shipwreck, looking at the square table in the living room, the Northern Qi carvings on the platform, the small white pottery pig in the Tang Dynasty, and the small bronze King Kong in the Northern Wei Dynasty.
He wrote, "I am recognizing the way, a way back to the past." No wonder he turned to the history of ancient art. Politics invaded everything, and there was still a little bit of real life left in the remaining art, and he saw how a little coppersmith shed tears for his heart when he struck a whitebait, and while he struck, the lines of the fish trembled with humanity.
Shen Congwen, let me have two knives like this, and clench my fists to you! There is nothing to talk about today, the ancients came to go on a blind date. Back to the living room of the Lin family. At nine o'clock that night, Beethoven's ** was played, others were talking, and Shen Congwen was lying on the sofa listening. So, let me copy this passage of Shen's words, "I lie down, and I feel that there is no sofa under me..."Under the spring sun, the Luohan bamboo in the temple, there are people rubbing silk threads in the open space in front of the stage, twenty small copper spindles rotate in a small bamboo frame, rotate and rotate, there is a silk thread shop in the city, and the young women in the city and outside the city have embroidered aprons, pillow handkerchiefs, and flower purses, organizing an ordinary sad and happy life in a region.
The water of the big river is rising in the dark, and no one knows how far away the rain has fallen, and it is a piece of green bean water!
When the beach was on the water, people on both sides of the river were in chaos, and there were calls and laughter everywhere in pursuit of fish and shrimp, and timber and livestock floating upstream. Along the river, there are people pulling and sinking nets.
Someone's kite broke its string and flew into the distance.
Someone led the horse but looked at the pull, and an inattentive horse slipped off the reins of the road, and galloped away to the wilderness, to nature, and along the river. All the urchins near and far clapped their hands over this. Bamboo forest after bamboo forest, one green after another, there are many small kites with broken strings hanging on the bamboo tops.
Some small houses in front of and behind the bamboo forest are separated by some small houses, lined up by the river, and there are life sorrows everywhere, and that is constant and changing...”
The border city writes Xiangxi so beautifully, it is like a paradise in the world, so I didn't like Shen Congwen so much in the past, I felt that the affection was close to Jia Baoyu, and the writing was close to folk songs.
But if one day you are also physically and mentally distressed and desperate, read it, read it word by word, read it out loud, you should see that the water is clear and deep, as if you have entered the deep current of time, you float like a boat, as if in a dream, and it seems that you really touch the root of something (including yourself), very quiet.
But as a male reader who has been exposed to Shen Congwen's works since childhood, Shen Congwen loves the capitalized "person" and truth, but can he treat the people around him with true love and truth? Just like Sun Yat-sen, he wanted to liberate the Chinese as slaves, but the underage girls around him were similar to slaves.
Do they really love people? Or is it the concept of loving only people? After all, men's history is still different from women's, so I'm sorry, it's hard for me to empathize with "his history". Having written so much, I just want to answer that question: what is "living in reality"?
It is not against one's own existence. Reality has always been cruel and helpless, but literature makes us dream. Attached is a sketch drawn by Shen Congwen on May 1, 1957 for the parade on the Bund on Labor Day, a dreaming boat, undulating in the sea. Next to the painting, he wrote, "In the sea of red flags, the sea of songs, the sea of gongs and drums, in short, do not wake up."