Chapter 53 dinner killer

Occasionally I'll have a bourgeois, cultured dinner with people I don't know very well, and I'll discover for the millionth time that China is a Tower of Babel, and I'm living on its scaffolding.I'm generally liberal and outspoken, and that's often the source of minor troubles.For example, some people will talk nonsense: "Chinese people have no democratic qualities at all." - Don't think that this kind of thing is uncommon. From my experience, ten people who hold power as big as pigeon eggs or whose family assets exceed a pitiful $200,000 Nine out of 10 people would say that—and I'd be tempted to say, "Have you ever considered that this isn't a problem at all?" The elephant in the china shop.After I finished speaking, everyone laughed in agreement, and then fell into a momentary silence. People's expressions were saying: Ah, how could he be interested in this kind of thing?

Instead, I thought: What the hell, what kind of humans are they not interested in serious things?I think it is only natural for a person to have a little interest in social issues.Otherwise, don't you only care about your own shit?This is what it was like at the Tower of Babel: I sat at the same table as them, but in a completely different world. Generally speaking, some people love life more than others. They like to dress well, eat well, and have their own spiritual life. They feel that all kinds of competition are not very meaningful; others love the truth more than the former. , They have a habit of deciphering the secrets of the world, and they don't think the exquisite life is interesting.The former will ridicule the latter as angry youth or bookish, while the latter will consider the former as narrow-minded or alienated—this latter definition is actually the essence of the middle class.

This is a microcosm of our Tower of Babel, and we do not feel that this mutual barrier should be bridged.Nowadays people often sigh and say: "Everyone is an isolated island." Of course it is true that each of us is alone on the ocean, facing this world that has existed for hundreds of millions of years, but in the original sentence, John? Dunne meant the exact opposite: "No man is an island." The problem is that although these two kinds of people are very different and have a lot of conflicts in their interactions, they have very similar positions in this world.This discovery arose from a day when I recognized that "Lavretzky awkwardness" that I had induced to pervade the dinner table.

Lavretzky is a character in Turgenev's novel "A Noble House" that I read in my first year of high school. This gentleman is similar to me, and he can be regarded as quite cultivated, but because he cares about the future of Russia, he has acquired a kind of annoying My biggest problem: I never compromise in the face of stupid words, and I have to argue about right and wrong.As a result, although he is friendly and easy to communicate with, he is still seen as a fanatic or weirdo.He searched and promoted the wonderful recipe to save the motherland everywhere, and suffered countless torments in his heart. What happened in the end?He found that the only thing he could do was embarrass others.Not to mention that the Russian people don't understand him, even the girl he likes thinks he's too weird.As for his ideal of reforming the motherland, his compassion for the serfs, his righteous indignation against the tragic reality, etc., of course, it is useless.

This kind of person is the "superfluous person" who shines in the history of literature.Interestingly, in addition to his kind, there is another kind of superfluous people, that is, the kind of Onegin described by Pushkin. They are individualists, who think more about personal enjoyment, and just live in their own In a small world.In other words, they're pretty much the same guys I met at dinner—let's just say no, we're all the same people, we're all the scumbags of the world, even though I guess they won't admit it. I have another criterion: if you are floating in this world, then you are superfluous.

I float like a hot air balloon every day, and I don’t think my excess is terrible, but rather interesting, but I also feel that if all kinds of people with social ideals are redundant, it will be a very bad thing.Everyone understands that our society is not perfect yet, but one can live without change, and for the middle class, it seems to live well without change. If many people accept this truth, they can live in peace for a while. Somewhere in Chaoyang District, Beijing, there will be a middle-class dinner that should be funny and intimate.Unfortunately, they just happened to invite me, which I neither believed nor shamelessly worried about embarrassing others—and the dinner killer struck again.If our contemporary life is a dinner, then this is my role.