Chapter 13 the sad face of history

Saul Bellow has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he writes better than the average winner.In "Herzog" he writes about demolishing houses, "At the intersection he stopped to watch the demolition crew at work. The huge metal ball swung up the wall, pierced the brickwork with ease, entered the room, and idly browsed It touched the kitchen and living room. Whatever it touched, everything fell apart and fell to the ground. White smoke rose quietly. It was almost evening, and the garbage was burning in the ever-expanding demolition area. The paint smelled like incense. Smoke. Old floorboards blazing with joy—the funeral of exhausted objects. Six-wheeler trucks were hauling away dismantled bricks, scaffolding made of pink, white, and green doors shook. Gases of all kinds , chaotic and blinding, enveloping the sun as it headed toward New Jersey and west."

This sequence is great, you can hear the voices, you can smell the smells, the changes in perspective are spectacular, like a camera is moving, and more importantly, it has a confrontation between the writer's mind and the violence being described.Therefore, although some readers will complain about not being able to understand it, I still insist on citing it.If you don't understand, read it twice.My question is, what adverb did the writer use when describing the big metal ball? That's right, "lazily".The vandals - the big metal balls - just lolled and destroyed the houses.This ball seems to have consciousness, personality, very arrogant, and frightening.The emotion of this paragraph is converted into plain language, "No matter how strong the house is, it will fall down!"

In general, human life is like this.The house will be demolished, the city will fall, the prosperity is always like a dream, and time will pass by.Contrary to the general imagination, there is actually no sense of tragedy in this kind of thing. Just like Bellow wrote, destruction is always easy and common.Faye Wong sang well: There are times when we get together and leave, nothing lasts forever.How many kingdoms have there been in Central Asia, and now there are only reckless yellow sands left, but who would really sigh for it?My hometown, Shenyang, used to be full of roaring machinery and numerous blast furnaces, but all of them disappeared in a blink of an eye, factories were razed to the ground, and low-cost residential areas were newly built.How many people have said anything about it?Human beings have witnessed too much ups and downs, and they have long understood that sighing is useless.There is a solemn line in Horace's poem: Glorious towers and low huts, both hasten with the same step.In modern times, TS Eliot turned against the sublime: the world collapsed, not with a bang, but with a sigh.

Chinese poets are sensitive to the ups and downs, and repeatedly lamented the autumn rain in Maoling, the deep spring of the bronze sparrow, and the golden and copper fairy.This thing is called epic poetry, and if it has a purpose, it is to learn from the past to know the present.But who has learned from it?Du Mu said, "People in Qin have no time to mourn for themselves, but later generations mourn for them; what later generations mourn for but ignore it, also makes future generations mourn for future generations." This sentence can sum up the entire political history of China.Chinese history has failed to resolve the contradiction between ruling power and civil rights. It is like a spoof, and the rulers always fall into the same ditch.

This kind of consciousness, this kind of thinking, I call "the sad face of history".Its core idea is that rise and fall is the normal state of the world, but beauty can never be realized.All over the world there are historical sorrows, as reflected in the above quotations, but in my opinion, only China can be called a country with lingering sorrows.In the cycle of history, progress does not exist, and ordinary people are discouraged.It's like a naive sheep, this wolf eats it, that wolf eats it too, and the sheep is nothing: I'm your fucking food! Such a sheep will definitely lose the innocence of a sheep, or develop the ambition to be a wolf, or be indifferent to everything.Such ordinary people must lack public awareness and develop selfishness.As for such intellectual elites, most of them will put their love on mountains and rivers and boast of being romantic.As a result, people will look sad when facing public affairs.Marcuse talked about "one-dimensional people", that is, people who lose their critical spirit towards society and blindly agree with reality.As far as this meaning itself is concerned, let me say that if there are ten such people, nine of them are in China.

So what to do?All I can say is that we cannot repeat the mistakes of history.The words are unclear, so let’s leave it at that.This kind of talk is useless, but it is not unnecessary.When we speak about the country, society and history, we really don’t need to consider whether it is useful or useless, because we have only one choice: cheer up in the sad face of history, and smile in front of the tyranny of the big metal ball.