Chapter 57 aerial root of life

A director of a TV station called and invited me to appear in a special program about Ma Guoxin, and I readily agreed.Ma Guoxin, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, master architect, chief architect of Beijing Architectural Design and Research Institute, whose representative works include Beijing National Olympic Sports Center and so on.The TV director called me Ma Guoxin's close friend and bosom friend, but that's not really the case.Ma Guoxin and I were high school classmates in the late 1950s. After graduation, we had no contact for many years. Only in recent years, because I started to try architectural criticism, did we reconnect with each other. But we are both very busy, and the fields we are busy in are very different. Because of the overlap, each other doesn't know much about each other's career and life, and it is reluctant to say that they are friends.But I'd love to have a say in a feature film about him

, the immediate impetus came from a question posed to me by a young friend.The question of this young friend is: In your generation, adolescence is catching up with a period when the cultural atmosphere is becoming more and more impoverished and rigid. Does this greatly limit your accumulation of cultural literacy?I think that by appearing in Ma Guoxin's special program, I can give a clear answer. An individual life cannot choose an era, and it is what happens when it catches up.However, no matter what the situation is, an individual life can still exert its own subjective initiative, and try to absorb even the thinnest nutrients in the space in which it lives, so as to enrich its body and mind.

Ma Guoxin was excellent in both character and learning in high school. The excellent grades in the classroom are ignored here. What I want to talk about is that he is good at broadening his horizons, enriching his cognition, and improving his quality in extracurricular activities.At that time, although the string of class struggle was getting tighter and tighter, there were still various technological and cultural exhibitions. Ma Guoxin and I were both exhibition fans. We often went to various technological and cultural exhibition places on Sundays. We went to see them separately. When they meet each other at school, they will communicate with each other and talk about their experiences.There are also times when we make an appointment to see together.What impressed me the most was going to the Soviet Exhibition Hall (now called the Beijing Exhibition Hall) together to see the retrospective exhibition of Qi Baishi's works, as if Master Baishi had just passed away before that.The works exhibited that time were very rich, and the exhibits in several halls were dazzling. We thought that the themes painted by Master Baishi were nothing more than flowers, birds, insects, fish and still life toys, but we saw many large landscapes and figures. The style is unified and harmonious The variety is endless.Our two teenagers were deeply shocked in front of those works. Halfway through seeing them, we walked slowly hand in hand unconsciously, as if silently conveying our respective insights in that way.Watching dramas and watching movies are also our common hobbies.Ma Guoxin seems to prefer watching movies.Of course, the film resources at that time were scarcer than now, and there were no video tapes and CDs, mainly domestic films and translated Soviet films.Both Ma Guoxin and I love to watch Soviet literary films adapted from literary masterpieces, such as "Othello" adapted from Shakespeare's plays, "The Captain's Daughter" adapted from Pushkin's novels, "Mexicans" adapted from Jack London's novels. "etc.I remember that Ma Guoxin once got the beautifully printed color-printed promotional materials of "Soviet Film Week". Turned into joy.At that time, we often went to the auditorium of the Beijing branch of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association not far from the school to watch the original Soviet movies, such as "Forty-first" and "Wild Yannan Flying". It is also a great pleasure for people to discuss and argue.At that time, Soviet film magazines could be bought in foreign language bookstores, and Ma Guoxin and I often went to buy them.Although the Russian we learned in our foreign language class was not enough, we read it with a helpful attitude, and we were really influenced by it.Ma Guoxin called me a few months ago, saying that she visited Russia and went to a cemetery in Moscow, where she saw many celebrity tombstones, including Roma’s, and she was very excited when she spoke. How do ordinary people know Roma now? A Soviet film director, whose work "Lenin in 1918" was once well-known in China, but we all appreciate his "Murder on Dante Street" (also translated as "The Sixth Column").Ma Guoxin’s parents were both in Jinan at the time, and he had to go home during the winter and summer vacations. During the vacations, we corresponded. I remember that I sent him novels written by myself with self-drawn illustrations. Before the Spring Festival, he sent me self-made New Year’s cards, like Like a comic book, with stained glass threads tied at one corner, there are cartoons and phrases that make fun of me, making me angry and happy.When I was in high school, I was not good at sports, but Ma Guoxin paid great attention to physical exercise and was a well-rounded student.

I introduce these situations not only to answer the question of the young friend above, but also to tell all young people today that they must absorb cultural nutrition as much as possible during adolescence.Look at the huge banyan tree, the potted monstera, and many other plants. In addition to absorbing nutrients through the roots that go into the soil (this is like the main lesson in the classroom), they also have a number of aerial roots that strive hard to absorb nutrients from the air (this is the main lesson in the classroom). It’s like a vast extra-curricular space) to capture and suck the beneficial ingredients to enrich and improve one’s quality and character.It is precisely because of her growing vitality and her solid child skills that Ma Guoxin can achieve what she is today and has reached a peak in the professional field.Look at his masterpiece National Olympic Sports Center

Apart from professional advantages, the shape of the gymnasium not only has the charm of Western modern art, but also has the freehand brushwork of Qi Baishi's paintings. The shape of the entire building area is a bird's-eye view from the air. It's not a sight to look at, but the configuration of the half-moon pool and the design of the surrounding garden layout can be described as changing scenes step by step, full of drama, which can make some people feel like a movie montage.If he didn't have the literacy accumulation that he started consciously absorbing and digesting in middle school, he might not be able to come up with such a wonderful design later.

In fact, Ma Guoxin and I are basically lucky.Those who are a generation younger than me have caught up with the great cultural rupture and great absurdity, but they have given full play to their subjective initiative and nourished themselves as much as possible with the roots of life, so as to overcome cultural disasters to a certain extent, and make themselves in the reform and opening up. It is not uncommon to see examples of people who can quickly release their ingenuity and stand out from the crowd.I only know one who did not follow the crowd during those ridiculous years. He dug out hundreds of broken books from the pit of the "Four Old Books" that had not yet been burned, hid them and read them secretly, and benefited a lot in the end. Qian Qian, now a publisher with profound knowledge and high taste.I also know another one. He had no books and no teachers around him when he was in the queue, but every rest day, he spared no effort to cross the three high mountains to find an experienced conversation partner, to increase knowledge for his mind and for his soul " Charge," and now he's a well-known sociologist.

Now there are some people who complain, saying that there are too many books, the explosion of information, and the excessive cultural excess on the Internet, which makes it easy to be fooled by the "bubble culture". They always hope to be in a "just right" cultural environment. It is convenient to pick up and benefit at your fingertips.It is reasonable to expect the cultural environment to be more and more optimized, and the direction of social life is indeed the same, but an individual life cannot wait for everything to be optimized before nourishing and improving oneself. Consciously grow and extend one's own life air root, capture, screen out, suck, and digest beneficial ingredients in a limited growth space, accumulate thick and thin hair, innovate chicly, and bear brilliant career results.