Prose丨Jia Pingwa: Talking about reading

Talking about reading

Text丨Jia Pingwa

People cannot live without money, but as long as they have a bowl of food to eat, what is money?

Being poor is not our fault, but books will make us low in status but not low in character, and we will be poor but not low in ambition.

Friends of middle school students must value books. Don’t be jealous of anything, but you can be jealous of reading. You can have no or few friends, but you can’t make friends with books for a day.

Poverty is a preparatory condition for becoming a writer. Books are aversion to being rich, and rich people are lazy. You must learn to force yourself to read quietly and understand the essence of the book.

There are naturally many disadvantages to being good at reading.

For example, if you are poor all your life and don’t want to be an official, you don’t have good health, you are not a good husband, you don’t have good popularity, and you have a bad personality.

However, being able to study well must have the benefits of reading, such as being able to talk about the vastness of the world, being able to understand the difficulties of life, having self-awareness, being able to anticipate, not being sad for suffering, and being happy when not being favored. , When you are lonely, you are not lonely, and when you are alone, you are not alone, so you should give up the desire for power, abandon glitz, be free and optimistic, and be self-respecting, self-respecting, self-reliant, self-reliant, and self-reliant in the hustle and bustle of the world, neither humble nor fearful nor vulgar nor flattery.

Read all the books you can find, regardless of literature, politics, philosophy, history, aesthetics, astronomy, geography, medicine, architecture, art, music theory... If you are narrow in reading books, you will not be able to learn from them. If there are too many, the ideas will not be broad. However, don’t forget to read intensively. The real mastery of skills lies in intensive reading.

There are so many good books in the world that it is impossible to read them all in a lifetime, and although some books are good, you cannot like them all.

For example, I don’t like eating meat in my life, but meat is indeed a good thing in the world. If you like a book, you might as well read more.

The first time you can read it without hesitation, this is called enjoyment; the second time, you can sit down and read quietly, this is called chanting; the third time, you have to read it sentence by sentence, which is called in-depth study.

Read it three times, put it away for a few days, and then read it again, and you will often have new insights.

When reading, you should read high-quality books. If you really fall in love with a book, you can find more books by writers to read at a time, read their short and medium stories, or prose, poetry or even theory, and then read outsiders. For his comments and biographies, you can also read some of the works of his contemporaries.

In this way, you will know his writing, and even better know his person, and understand what kind of society and what kind of literary world it was at that time.

How did his experience, personality, character, hobbies, etc. contribute to the formation of his style.

In this world, every writer has his own set of techniques, and they all have traces that can be found. Of course, some are too talented, but they cannot be sorted out in a short time.

I read Chinese poems and essays by Lao Zhuang, Taibai, and Dongpo, and read foreign essays by Rabindranath Tagore, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hemingway, and I still cannot fathom the transition between rise and fall.

To be honest, I read too much and my understanding is shallow!

After reading this, you should ignore him, throw him away, and re-enter another person.

Literature (and indeed any other art) advances through breakthroughs. You must always pay attention to where your predecessors have gone and where your contemporaries have gone.

Any master, any masterpiece, you can only inherit, not repeat. When you study it, you must pull it to your feet and read it.

This is not arrogance, this is just knowing one's strengths and weaknesses, and learning the spirit and abandoning the superficial.

Nihilism is ridiculous, but if you read it on your knees, it can benefit you or harm you, and you will always be behind it.

From the submission of the manuscript in 1971 to the award-winning "Full Moon" in Beijing in 1978 to the completion of "The Wasted City", I have been writing for 22 years, and it is difficult to describe the joys and hardships during this period.

In the beginning, manuscripts were sent to all parts of the country, and rejections from all directions came back. I felt a little cold. I hated my own fate and the editor. I was worried that I would accomplish nothing in the future and wasted my youthful years. I would often be alone at night. People sit in silence with a solitary lamp.

But something like this happened;

I stayed up until one in the morning and was so sleepy that I just said sleep and fell asleep immediately. I blinked, but I didn't feel sleepy anymore.

So I thought, the same is probably true for creation.

I worked hard and posted all the rejection letters on the wall. I raised my head and lowered my eyes so that I could see my own shame.

There were so many rejection letters, almost half of which were printed rejection slips. Some editors were so busy at work that they didn’t even fill in my name on the printed slips.

It’s a pity that the concrete building where I live has no beams.

Otherwise, if I tie a rope and hang a piece of gall, I will become Goujian.

Those who speak loudly do not speak.

As long as you are truly lonely, you will be lonely. Loneliness is the value of literature. Loneliness is a way of writing. This way is obvious. Many people want to be writers but are unwilling to take this road. So what can be done? It is true that fame can be wasted, but fame does not necessarily mean success is so ruthless.

Big people all grow from small people to big people. Our purpose is to hope that small people like us will also grow up slowly.