Author: Mai Jia

At the moment, my mother is a few hundred meters away, in Fuyang People's Hospital, where I just came from. My mother is 85 years old. Like most old people, illness has become her closest partner, and fighting against it has become the main form and content of her life.

After calculation, in just 20 16 a year, she has been hospitalized six times, ranging from ten and a half months to dozens of days. As his most promising son, all I can do is stay with her and stay by her bed. This may be the best medicine for her to overcome her illness. I've tried, but I really can't stay with me every day. The so-called busy is one reason, and another reason is that I often have nothing to do when I am present, and I don't have much to say.

Often on the first day, she will tell me a lot, neighbors are long, neighbors are short, whose daughter-in-law is born, and which old man dies. Wait, that's it. I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say to her, because she doesn't understand what I can say and is not interested.

A village is our world. We can only talk about the people and things in this village. But this is limited after all, and it will be finished in one afternoon. Then we often look at each other silently, and then she will kick me out.

At this time, I often think that if she can read literature books, I will recommend her to read the works of Yu Dafu and Alai. I might recommend her to read Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Michael Vandajie's The English Patient, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Mo Yan's Fatigue of Life and Death, Yu Hua's Living and so on. If she can't read and listen, I can also read these works to her.

These works artistically reproduce the bitterness of life, the difficulty of survival, the brilliance and beauty of human nature, and the open-mindedness and broadness until death do us part. I believe that if she can listen to these works, she can first spend a lot of time trapped in bed by illness. Secondly, the connotations, symbols and revelations of these works can also give her strength to a certain extent, and make her anxious heart feel a certain degree of comfort and warmth.

But my mother only knows a few hundred words. All the words she knows are villagers' names, addresses, farm tools and household items. When it comes to reading, a newspaper can't cope, let alone a literary book.

She is separated from literature by Wan Li. She is an anomaly in the literary world. She knows nothing about the unique charm and power of literature, and it is even more difficult to use it. Even if my book, she can only touch it with her hands, and she can't get any strength with her heart. This is the most difficult thing for her, but I think it is also what she needs most at the moment. It is irreplaceable for our relatives to comfort her with slogans.

So what is literature? What's the use? We often hear the theory of literary uselessness. You have Cao Xueqin and Shakespeare in your heart, the boss won't give you a raise, you won't get points for finding a lover, you can't get a discount on buying a house, and so on.

Indeed, in the face of utilitarian reality, in a cold and even cruel world, literature is small, light as a feather, and even redundant. But you know, life is more than nine to five, more than houses and tickets.

To put it bluntly, life is not just the life of the body. Your physical life can only be treated with a house and a ticket, and we also have life outside the body, that is, the life of the mind. In the face of love and hate, sickness and death, joys and sorrows, our bodies are waste, and there is nothing we can do about something invisible and intangible.

And literature, just at this time, will play a role and be of great use to life. In the final analysis, literature is about the soul. It injects nutrients into the soul, dispels darkness, nourishes the soul silently, and makes the soul fuller and more powerful to cope with the pain more painful than the mother's illness.

Reference link:/2017/019/58013.shtml.