quotations from Jiang Xun's classic works
1) Civilization is not the arrogance of power, nor the greed of wealth. -Jiang Xun's Affectionate Ying Xiao Wo
2) When we want to pursue a mainstream clue of historical development, we often have to do some work to remove minor details and sort out a trunk from the clutter. An introduction of "development" or "history" can't avoid the emphasis on the characteristics of each dynastic period, because the so-called "development" and "history" are the connection between the transition from one dynastic period to another, and there is an organic life hidden under the layers of cultural relics and historical materials. We regard "history" as an organic life, precisely because every paragraph of it is growing and developing. It is not just a pile of inanimate data, but to strip away these data and revive the life of this ontology. -Jiang Xun's Meditation on Beauty
3) Knowing that you are actually a great wisdom, because in life we will fake, and we will even create a fake self, and even feel that this fake self is the real self more and more. -Jiang Xun's
4) Most of the regular script in the Tang Dynasty is closely related to political history, or it has a special commemorative significance to set up a monument and stone. Famous posts in the Song Dynasty are more notes of manuscripts and poems that people's personal lives are interested in, and they are closer to the calligraphy of the literati in the Eastern Jin Dynasty. Calligraphy returns to the plain and innocent expression of true nature, away from politics and history, without great ambitions, just to come back and be true to yourself. -Jiang Xun's The Beauty of Chinese Calligraphy
5) Most Song porcelains also pursue monochrome, pure white in Ding kilns, rain in Ru kilns, and black gold in Jianyang kilns, all of which are no longer ostentatious colors, but return to a more restrained, implicit and simple color essence. Calligraphy is the most concentrated expression of aesthetics in an era. Calligraphy aesthetics in Song Dynasty is also like ink landscape, which pursues simplicity and innocence, longs for liberation from the greatness of the times, and yearns for the completion of individual self and the expression of personality, without exaggerating grandeur, and prefers to come back and be an ordinary and simple self. -Jiang Xun's The Beauty of Chinese Calligraphy
6) We both have Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai in our personalities, and we will always have contradictions between the two personalities. Lin Daiyu died with uncompromising persistence, and Xue Baochai should know how to compromise with this world and survive. It is great wisdom that we have my persistence inside and can get along with others outside, and we can balance the two. -Jiang Xun's
7) There are some memories, which are not so specific. They seem to be a smell. I can close my eyes and rest assured that my mother is so close, and I am surrounded by an indescribable smell, which is the smell of my mother's body. -Jiang Xun's Letter to Young Artists
8) Loneliness and loneliness are different. Loneliness will panic, but loneliness is full. It is Zhuangzi's "spiritual communication with heaven and earth alone", which confirms the dialogue between life and the universe and has reached the most perfect state. -Jiang Xun
9) In this world, if there is someone you care about, do something for him and give him some warmth. When he is sad, let him lean on your shoulder, which is definitely the most important source of happiness. -Jiang Xun
1) Cold and burning alternate, and the body experiences injury and healing, cold and hot, pain and comfort, and the process of destruction and generation. He gazed at his pain soberly, as if at the same time the only salvation of the body in the chaotic desire. -Jiang Xun "Because of Loneliness"
11) The path he passed was full of tung trees. Every time he looked back, he felt that all the petals flying all over the sky were still in the air, and none of them fell on the ground. He looked back again and again, as if he were reciting the same sentence with his children in Chinese class. "It is the fog that slows down the falling of flowers." -Jiang Xun's "Young Taiwan Province"
12) Being calm in the face of regret may be a very important moment for beauty. -Jiang Xun's Beauty, Invisible Competitiveness
13) Ming, I stopped in front of faith for a long time. I watch this door. When should I go in? How do I get in? Will I meet you at the center of faith? I will go around the cloister quietly and look for you in every dark corner. -Jiang Xun's The Beauty of Angkor
14) These figures in the Wei and Jin Dynasties only remind us how much we have compromised with the world from a simple life as a teenager to an adult. I often ask myself how much I have compromised. I think the world wants you to do that, so show them. But every time I do it, I actually give up some of the most essential things of human nature. Because it is wearing away, it will become a performance, and it will also become a part of yourself. I unconsciously think that as long as there is a form, the real essence seems to be unimportant. -Jiang Xun's Beauty, Invisible Competitiveness
15) The meaning of life can't be complete until we have a full grasp of death. Before that, we are just a tired traveler wandering in the streets. -Jiang Xun's Forgetting Words
16) There is no difference between good and bad memories. The best memory and the worst memory will run out of the body again and again because they can't be forgotten.-Jiang Xun's Young Taiwan Province
17) Ji Kang said that not everyone deserves to listen to Guangling San. If you can't live a sense of loneliness, if you can't be independent, art and beauty are meaningless, but they are just arty. Every time I read Xiang Xiu's ode to nostalgia, I will always be moved by it, and my life will leave alone, but it will be crushed under the stereotyped dogma of group culture. -Jiang Xun's Six Lectures on Loneliness
18) There is a very full thing in loneliness. -Jiang Xun
19) Sometimes in retrospect, it seems like a long journey, just this constant and accidental gathering and parting. Sometimes one or two people's smiles will appear so casually, just because he used to be a colleague who gradually forgot the years. -Jiang Xun's Irrelevant Years
2) Next autumn, let's make an appointment to walk to the deep mountains. Let yourself be in a daze in front of the red mountains, let yourself resign from poverty, let yourself not draw a stroke, let yourself be depressed and depressed, but also let yourself understand: what we see is actually not the change of color and light. We saw Qian Qian's death and death in a blink of an eye, and in an instant we heard the cry of coming back and leaving every time since the flood. -Jiang Xun's
At this moment, all beings
1) I don't know if you will think that the mood of being close to water is really very different from that of being close to mountains. The water is softer, gentler, more obedient and more calm and reflective. Mountains are relatively stable, majestic and atmospheric things. These two things bring out two different aesthetic experiences, especially after the Southern Song Dynasty, because Hangzhou is its capital, which is called "Lin 'an", so its water experience is more obvious. -Jiang Xun's
2) People live numbly in taboos, which is not much different from death. -Jiang Xun's Unlocking the Da Vinci Code
3) We live in a city and a town. Because we respect the history and traditions before, future generations will respect what we left behind. The aesthetics of life is a kind of respect, and the aesthetics of life is a kind of respect for the old order. -Jiang Xun's Four Lectures on Taste
4) "Give my life to save pigeons" and "devote myself to feeding tigers". The murals of the Northern Dynasties describe the painful, fearful and noble life mode. People are no longer just discussed in the human world, but in the "biological" and "animal" world. The life of compassion here is no longer the life of Confucianism in the Han Dynasty, but the "sentient beings" who are treated equally with tigers, eagles, pigeons and deer. The Confucian world of human relations has been expanded, and people have been placed in all life to re-examine. The freedom and openness of Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi have been hindered, and life is no longer affirmation and joy, but accompanied by endless disasters and pains. These colorful murals point to the existence of life in the most tragic way, and make people realize the emptiness and disillusionment of life in great sorrow and pain. -Jiang Xun's Meditation on Beauty
5) So everyone can understand why all the leading men in the Song Dynasty were literati from the imperial examination, such as Fan Zhongyan, Han Qi and Su Dongpo, who we mentioned, once led in Shaanxi. The form of leading by literati will have different attitudes and ways to treat the whole war. They will not take the means of convincing others by force, but will take the way of avoiding war as much as possible. Compared with the mentality of actively triggering wars, the mentality of avoiding wars will form a very different political trend, so we can clearly see here why the founding of the Song Dynasty produced a very special cultural style, which is actually related to many of its political systems. -Jiang Xun's
6) A person who loves poetry loves life. If a person can tell the answer to life in one or two words, it will do harm to others. Life is too rich and complicated, so that in the end, it is not necessarily clear whether it is sorrow or joy. -Jiang Xun's "Jiang Xun on Literature: From the Book of Songs to Tao Yuanming"
7) Every beauty in life aesthetics has its own ecology and background. Sometimes people will make a fuss about things they don't know after changing their environment, but they will be surprised when they are really well informed. We should respect the life aesthetics developed by each ethnic group. -Jiang Xun's Four Lectures on Taste
8) Between people, there is a separation between life and death, but there is no third ending. -Jiang Xun
9) Wen Tong has a piece of "Ink Bamboo" in the National Palace Museum in Taipei and the National Palace Museum in Beijing. "Ink bamboo" became the theme of painting in the Northern Song Dynasty, and it was obviously painted with the brush strokes of calligraphy. Orchid and bamboo in literati paintings flourished during the Song and Yuan Dynasties, and evolved into "plum, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum" and "four gentlemen", which actually declared that the basic skills of painters must be based on the skill of calligraphy. Painting ink bamboo and bluegrass is actually the same as writing with a pen. -Jiang Xun's The Beauty of Chinese Calligraphy
1) I just mentioned that the two deepest sorrows of human beings are that time cannot be found and space cannot be found, that is, the infinity of time and space. Because of the background of Neo-Confucianism in the Song Dynasty, all the scholars were confronted with the problems of time and space. "The setting sun" is the sadness of time, and "the ruthlessness of grass" is the infinity of space. So he used ruthlessness to personify the setting sun and the grass. -Jiang Xun's
11) We will find that there are people in the pictures of the Tang Dynasty, but after five generations of pictures of the Song Dynasty, people have left, which is a bit like Ouyang Xiu's feeling that "Chunshan is near Pingwu, and pedestrians are more outside Chunshan". So you can't see people in the paintings after the Song Dynasty, because people are far away. "After the people return to Pinglin Crescent" is the scenery you see after people are removed. In the Tang Dynasty, you didn't have a chance to see the scenery without people, or you didn't look at it from the perspective of people. The scenery seen from human's point of view is conquered, and the scenery not seen from human's point of view is the "all things are complacent" put forward by the Song Dynasty, which enables you to see the nature of the universe with the experience of a flower or a snowflake and make yourself a part of nature. -Jiang Xun's
12) We are all trying to understand the mystery of life through various methods of interpreting poetry, whether it is horoscope or palm reading, but we can't fully grasp that mystery all the time. Poetry itself is between solvable and unsolvable. When it is solvable, it is because you have projected life into it. It is unsolvable because it may be stubborn, because you are always unwilling to interpret the essential phenomenon of life. -Jiang Xun's
13) This infinite and unfinished blank seems to be the creator's invitation to the future. This blank makes the poem appear and the seal appear. It makes space and time, between reality and abstraction, and produces a confusing effect. -Jiang Xun's "Meditation on Beauty"
14) sublated the totem of animals. China people did not give up the concept of tribal existence, but only made it more idealistic and realistic. Implemented in the most ordinary life, it affirmed the people in this world. I have no fear of nature and no yearning for God. I am a China person who "works at sunrise, and goes into the sun to rest. What good is it for me to dig a well and drink Dili". This optimistic, simple and secular aesthetics sprouted in the Spring and Autumn Period and was embodied in the earliest human-oriented art. After the agitation of various local colors before and after the Warring States Period, it swung in the extremes of rationality and sensibility, discipline and romance, and in the Han Dynasty, it completed a typical vulgar culture. Different from Egyptian, Greek and Indian, it is secular and simple, ordinary and extensive, and has become the most important foundation of cultural symbols after China. -Jiang Xun's Meditation on Beauty
15) The charm of "procrastination" is that all the rationality has been analyzed and the conclusion has been reached, but it may be completely destroyed the next day. If there is no "worry" in life, what's the point? Different ages indulge in different things. Rationality is a person's way of thinking, and so is irrationality. Irrationality has a greater impact on life, and it is also a great force in the composition of life. Part of this irrational energy develops towards philosophy and part towards literature. If it is literature, it is definitely not a logic, but an emotion. -Jiang Xun's "Jiang Xun on Literature: From the Book of Songs to Tao Yuanming"
16) "The heart is long and the flame is short" is a state of life. It is not talking about candles, but about a great passion that has burned to the end, that is, there are still so many inner passions, but there is so little possibility that material can provide you with burning. -Jiang Xun's Jiang Xun on Song Ci
17) Zhao Mengfu should be the first figure in the "Three Masterpieces of Poetry, Calligraphy and Painting". Zhao Mengfu specifically said: The painting of strange stones uses the brush strokes of "flying white" in calligraphy, and the painting of dead wood uses the brush strokes of ancient seal characters. To draw ink bamboo, you need to know the "eight methods of forever writing". Zhao Mengfu redefined the brand-new understanding of the ancient idiom "Calligraphy and painting are of the same origin", and also clearly revealed the spiritual essence of the new literati aesthetics with calligraphy as the dominant painting. -Jiang Xun's Beauty of Chinese Calligraphy
18) "Emotion moves in the middle" is the most important content in all arts. -Jiang Xun's "Jiang Xun on Literature: From the Book of Songs to Tao Yuanming"
19) Some of the most beautiful qualities left over from traditional experience in human civilization should not all disappear because of the rapid mass production of industry. -Jiang Xun's Four Lectures on Taste
2) The four great calligraphers of the Song Dynasty-Su (Dongpo), Huang (Valley), Mi (Tai) and Cai (Beijing or Cai Xiang)-are four very different personal styles. Tang Kai emphasized that the times surpassed the individuality, but in the Song Dynasty, on the contrary, the completion of personal calligraphy style surpassed the requirements of the times. -Jiang Xun's "The Beauty of Chinese Calligraphy"