Chapter 67 6. Yue Sheng and his salon

In the late 1980s, there was a unique small salon in the youth intellectual circles in Beijing. The owner of the salon was named Zhao Yuesheng. The first time I met Yuesheng was in September 1982, when the Society of Modern Foreign Philosophy held a meeting in Lushan.Before going up the mountain, a few young people went to Jiujiang Yanshui Pavilion to play. In front of the window was the surging Yangtze River. Someone suggested buying a drink, and he immediately agreed, saying: "I don't know how to drink, but I like to watch you drink. I'm also light and floating." This sentence made me fall in love with him all of a sudden.At that time he seemed to be giving up drinking, really abstaining from alcohol.Shortly thereafter, I was transferred to the Research Office of Modern Foreign Philosophy and became a colleague with him.We became close friends a year later. I fell out of love and was very lonely. I often went to his house, and he often accompanied me to the tavern.I remember that year's New Year's Eve, when he saw me looking devastated, he accompanied me to look for small restaurants that were still open, and finally found one. The two of us had a New Year's Eve dinner in a deserted restaurant.He opened the quit, in fact, the capacity for alcohol is astonishing.Once, when I was reading a book in Longtan Lake Park, I suddenly heard someone say loudly: "I think this person looks like Zhou Guoping to the point that it can't be better!" It turned out to be Guo Jianying. Longtan Lake is here.In my basement, we drank beer. Yue Sheng drank nearly ten bottles each, but he didn't think it was enough, so he went to drink two thermoses of draft beer, and ended up drunk, but only vomited a few times.

We often go to the bookstore together, or listen to music at his house, talk about books, and talk about the poems I just wrote.He often said: "Books, music, wine, friends, and finally women." I thought he was enlightening me, but it was not.Seeing Yu'er returned to my side, he was really happy for me and admired Yu'er very much, but he still advised me: "Romance with Yu'er for a while, and then go back to ancient Greece. In ancient Greece, women had no place, men You see how peaceful the world is.” At a gathering of friends, he said to himself: “I can’t love any more, and if I love any more, I’ll change from a Greek to a Roman.” However, within a few minutes of saying this, He suddenly shouted excitedly: "Do you know that Yan has been gone for more than 20 days without telling me a word!" Yan is his wife, who went to France, and they also broke up later.According to his analysis, my susceptibility, including to women, is both an advantage and a weakness.Once in a meeting in Zhenjiang, a female graduate student from a certain school liked me and was relatively close to me, and was sent back to the school ahead of schedule by the head of the department who came with me.I was very sad, I was drunk during the dinner, and cried over and over again: "I hate you, why do you treat a weak woman like this!" Yue Sheng came to persuade me: "You can say that a young man has convulsions, why do you have convulsions?" ?” I yelled, “You’re not a human being, you’re just a bunch of concepts!” Later he relayed the story to Jianying, and Jianying agreed, angrily saying, “We walked all the way, so many beautiful girls, and he didn’t see anything! "

Yue Sheng can be called ethereal.In the kingdom of poetry, the water and the sky are the same color. If I am underwater, he is in the sky.He is a born spiritual aristocrat in taste, living in the world of Mozart and Goethe.Once, when we were talking about the necessity of aristocratic culture to culture, Gan Yang cited Hitler as an example, and he immediately refuted: "What kind of aristocrat is Hitler? An Austrian corporal! How can he preserve high-level culture? National socialism is egalitarianism, Those who support the Nazis are all workers!" He is also a person who loves friends very much, and when he talks about friends, his eyebrows are beaming, without restraint, as if everyone is a genius and a perfect person.So, after getting a new two-bedroom house in the mid-eighties, he often entertained friends at home, turning his home into a salon.Every time he holds a Patti, he is very strict in the selection of guests, and he will never allow a layman to mix in.His standard is whether he is educated or not. If he says someone is "uneducated", that person will no longer be in his field of vision.The culture he mentioned has nothing to do with academic qualifications, but is just a matter of temperament and taste, which can be sensed intuitively.A certain gentleman claims to be the number one talented person in the south of the Yangtze River, but in his eyes he is an uneducated person, and he has always been rejected.This became a heart disease of this gentleman. Once when he was drunk, he cried and confide his grievances, but he was unmoved.

He is really a good material to be the owner of a salon. He is bold and careful, and he takes good care of every guest without showing any signs.As soon as you enter his house, there is first-class music in the living room, and there are plenty of wine and food in the dining room, you will immediately feel relaxed and at ease.If we were mostly friends in the academic circle, we would not talk much about learning, but mostly chatting about the past, what we have seen and heard, about books, and when we talked about the meeting place, we were all in high spirits and witty.I should be considered the most tongue-in-cheek one, but I like to be an audience, I think it is a kind of enjoyment.They are all masters of speech, Yue Sheng's passion and generosity, Zheng Lin's eloquence and sharpness, You Yu's rationality and wit, Jia Ying's chic and reserved, each has its own characteristics, and they are all impressive.Sometimes the verbal confrontation, the game of wits, provokes me, and I will fight back with a word or two, which often attracts a burst of applause.It's a pleasant atmosphere when people of similar intelligence are together and can appreciate each other.In the middle of the night, it's usually time to talk dirty jokes, but the topic of Yue Sheng inevitably returns to ancient Greece, reaching the pinnacle of elegance.Sometimes, in my sleep, I could hear him talking about Homer and Helen.

We often go to the outskirts of Beijing in groups, and there are a lot of people. If we gather 20 people, it is not something that Yue Sheng, who is a poor scholar, can afford.At this time, I have a lot of money to pay for the car.The tycoons I’m talking about are mainly Yu Yang and Beiling. In fact, they were both in the stage of starting a business at that time, and they were not considered tycoons. Unfortunately, they had their own weaknesses, so they were taken advantage of.Yu Yang has a rough appearance, but he has an inner beauty. He loved culture in his adolescence, and he was also a person who read Tolstoy fascinated, leaving sequelae.Beiling seems to be gentle, but in fact he is very wild. He is enthusiastic about everything that goes out of the way, and he has a typical temper. As long as he is with friends, he is fine.Such two people should be blamed for these poor scholars relying on them and spending a lot of unjust money.For large-scale events, the person who actually organizes and manages them is usually Ah Jian.A Jian is a well-deserved pioneer of cultural blindness in the new era. He just graduated from university and quit his job in the early 1980s. He insisted on being unemployed for the freedom of the soul and celibate for the freedom of the body.He wrote poetry so prolifically that he distributed a typescript to friends almost every month.However, the poems can't be sold for money, and life is inevitable, so I have to eat and drink everywhere, and sleep when I meet girls.His poems are written very freely, more and more colloquially, they really come out, some are very wonderful, some are very ordinary.Because of his lustful nature, he couldn't help flirting while writing, so that a girl who had been wronged by him commented: "How can this be poetry? It's a criminal's confession!" After getting acquainted with Yue Sheng, he claimed that The running dog took on the responsibility of running errands, and often went to the Yuesheng family to lead orders, and by the way sweep the wine cabinets there.

There are many lovely women in Yuesheng's salon.Jiaying brought Yu Qi, saying that she picked it up from the road, and she always sat quietly in the corner.Later I discovered that she also always helps her friends quietly, independent but kind-hearted, assertive but understanding.I brought Yu'er, who is stupid and clever.Meng Mei, a loner, conquers or frightens men away with her wisdom and charm.The kind-hearted Lida cheered everyone up with piano and singing.One summer, a large group of friends were camping in Huangsong Valley. Suddenly a tenor voice rang out from the reservoir. It was "My Sun" in Italian. All voices were silent for a while, and only this stunningly beautiful singing voice was free under the night sky. stretch.Since then, another pair of regular customers have been added to the salon, namely the singer Jing Ma and his beautiful girlfriend Zeng Qiong.Xiao Zeng was so pure back then, Yue Sheng said she was Lily of the Valley.

Unlike me, although Yuesheng loves culture, he hardly writes anything, and is content to be a connoisseur.He sighed: "With Goethe and Baudelaire, what poetry do we write!" I often argue with him, and I say: Although there are Goethe and Baudelaire, there is only one me, and this I is Goethe And Baudelaire can not be replaced, so I still have to write.With one exception, he couldn't help but write an article.There was a person who was called by the media at that time "a strange man in Chinese academia" who wrote an article criticizing the so-called modernist trend of thought, and relied on the support of a certain big man to force "Duoshu" to be published.What is ridiculous is that he is extremely ignorant of the object of his criticism, and the article is full of common-sense mistakes, such as "Hooker's phenomenology" and "translating outsiders with redundant people".Yue Sheng was filled with anger after reading it, but he was inconvenient to argue about the content, so he wrote an article to expose his flaws and published it in a journal.Not long after, he received a letter from "The Stranger", saying that he was a member of the Amateur Boxing Association and when would he practice a hundred rounds.I feel that it is a pity that Yue Sheng does not write. He talked about books very well, so I repeatedly encouraged him to write essays on reading.He finally started to write, and the more he wrote the better, but unfortunately he only wrote three articles before he went to France.Many years later, an overseas publishing house asked me to compile a collection of essays by contemporary Chinese scholars. I only selected ten works, and these three were his.I am by no means selfish, but I really feel good.

I'm not a sociable person. For me, Yuesheng's salon is a ready-made banquet. I thought it tasted good, so I sat down at the table.On the other hand, I am relatively easy-going when making friends, and I don't belong to any circle in essence.Some of my friends may not understand each other and do not communicate with each other. I think this has nothing to do with me, and I am not affected by it.Friendship is everyone's private matter, and it is in this matter of making friends that friends don't have to seek common ground.Outside of Yuesheng's circle, I also have some close friends, such as Runsheng and Huaihong.Huaihong and I got to know each other very early, when he had just changed his job and applied for a graduate student at the National People's University.In the military environment, he actually read Sartre and wrote poetry, which was very good, Neruda's style, and that alone was unusual.

The late 1980s is a nostalgic time.At that time, I felt that I was very young, and the friends around me were also very young, and there was infinite power hidden in our bodies.I am most proud of these friends, in my eyes, all of them are full of talent and temperament.I believe that together we can not only enjoy the purest friendship, but also do the most beautiful career.At that time, I felt that the good times had just begun, and it seemed that they could go on like this endlessly, but I didn't expect it to come to an abrupt end soon.Looking back now, how far away that period of time has been.After that, too many things happened. The old salon no longer existed, friends went their separate ways, and many people's life scenes changed dramatically.However, there are also constants in the changes.For example, Yue Sheng, although he has settled in Paris and earns his living by doing business, he still loves his friends as always, and his home has become a free hotel for friends or unknown friends who go to Paris.I stayed at his house twice in the 1990s, and found that he lived an extremely peaceful life, as peaceful as a farmer. Apart from work, he was only accompanied by books, music, and his family.His friends felt that he was lonely and advised him to return to China, but he was unmoved.So I thought, isn't the nobleman in the world originally a farmer, perhaps this is the most suitable living state for his nature.