The Sea Beyond the Mountain - About "Beyond the Mountain" (Wang Jiaxin)

"Beyond the Mountain" was written by me more than 20 years ago At that time, I was still a college student who had just arrived on the university campus from a remote mountainous area. Therefore, for me, re-reading this poem is like opening an old photo album that has been sealed for many years, and seeing again the childish, yet admirable and nostalgic version of myself in my early years.

Obviously, "Beyond the Mountain" originated from childhood experience. I was born at the foot of Wudang Mountain in the mountainous area of ??northwestern Hubei. My parents were primary and secondary school teachers. Since I was a child, my parents' jobs were transferred and I have lived in five or six places, but I have never left the world in the mountains. To me when I was young, the world was the silent campus after school, the clear river in the mountains, and the silent mountains surrounding it all.

And I am a young man who indulges in fantasy and is full of strong curiosity about the outside world. The first two sentences of the poem are a true portrayal of my "childhood". I think almost everyone has some "secret wishes" in their childhood and adolescence, and this distant look and fantasy about "the other side of the mountain" in the poem constituted my unique secret when I was a child - looking at it today Come on, it has also secretly affected my life.

However, this alone is not enough to constitute a poem, so "sea" appeared in my life and finally in this poem. The appearance of "sea" coincides with "mountain". It reveals a poetic structure. The "mountain" and "sea" here can be read in a metaphorical sense: mountain, a real world, closed, dark, and depressing; sea, an imaginary world, open, bright, and free. The sea is the end of mountains, rivers and land, and the beginning of another world. The sea, from ancient times to the present, has been a call to man's free nature and imagination. And these meanings were impossible for me to realize when I was young. I just relied on my fantasy nature to look at the other side of the mountain and imagine the blue of the sea.

However, as we all know, this fantasy of another world is the most vulnerable to frustration in real life. It can be said that any "impractical" fantasy will be shattered one day in the face of the "green-faced" reality. I experienced these heart-wrenching moments time and time again throughout my teenage years. However, it is incredible that when the fantasy is frustrated, the idealistic spirit takes root in life - it becomes more inner and more stubborn because of the frustration in the real environment! The second stanza of the poem What is mainly revealed is this belief in the "sea". Maybe it's due to my unyielding nature, maybe it's a proverb I read when I was in junior high school, "As long as you walk along the river, you will definitely find the sea", which gave me this belief. At this time, the "sea" - this childhood dream has been raised to the level of the entire life for re-understanding. It is different from the sea in the first verse. It already has a certain symbolic color of life ideals. . "Yes, I have been disappointed again and again/when I climbed to the top of the mountain that tempted me one after another." Maybe any ideal is a trap of temptation, and any ideal is elusive, but it is In this arduous and tortuous search process, life is improved and enriched, and life is endowed with hope and meaning. "The snow-white tide rushes in every night/wets my dry soul again and again..."

This is how fate created our generation. Our generation, born in the 1950s and 1960s, received an idealistic education since childhood. We experienced the "Cultural Revolution" and went to the mountains and countryside. After the "Cultural Revolution", we came to university campuses. Some people call us the idealistic generation. Others call us a disillusioned generation. Idealism has cultivated our fantasies and spiritual temperament, but we are also the generation that has paid the heaviest price for the illusion of "ideals." Among my contemporaries, there are many who have gone through hardships and still maintained their idealistic spirit, but there are also many who have become disheartened and become very confused. It is based on this understanding of my contemporaries that I wrote later in the poem: "Friends, please believe -".

This is a speech to my contemporaries, but it is also an inspiration to myself: I believe that there is a higher realm in life, I believe that after climbing countless mountains, I will eventually climb to such a peak, I believe that after all the experiences The "final sea" after the ordeal will eventually illuminate our eyes and lives...

Rereading this poem today, I certainly feel its artistic childishness, because the poem points us to the path , its length and hardship far exceeded my imagination when I was young. In real life, although I have seen the sea I longed for in childhood countless times, the "sea" in my mind is still out of reach. So, what is the most important thing to me now? It is still "faith". If I can't regain this affirmation on a higher level, it's hard to imagine me continuing to do it later in life. Re-reading "Beyond the Mountain" and looking towards the direction of my childhood, I felt this again.