Chapter 10 cost of nostalgia

The house has been built. It has two floors, seven or eight rooms, and a large balcony. It is located on a peninsula surrounded by water on three sides.Since I was beyond my reach and couldn't be on site to supervise the work frequently, the stop-and-go construction took more than a year.The house was built into a red brick house, which has also become my great regret. In my memory, most of the houses here used to be stilted buildings, half sitting and half hanging by the mountain, which has many advantages such as saving land, saving labor, and avoiding tides.The walls are mostly composed of stones or blue bricks, which are very clear and cool.Green bricks, also known as "smoke bricks" here, are "choked" with smoke in firewood kilns, and will always retain the color of green smoke.It can be inferred that in ancient China, firewood was used as the main fuel for burning bricks, and blue bricks became the colors of the Qin Dynasty, the Han Dynasty, the Tang and Song Dynasties, and the Ming and Qing Dynasties.This color even locked in the interest of future generations and prefabricated our understanding of Chinese culture: it seems that only under the background of blue bricks, bamboo tables and chairs are harmonious, porcelain pots and cups are suitable, and a volume of poems Or only a scripture has its roots and roots, and it can be in harmony with the wall.

Blue bricks are a kind of architectural pictographs, and they are ancient ink stamps, which can continuously deliver scattered memories to today. About two years ago, Lao Li told me in a long-distance call: The blue bricks have been fired and bought, would you like to come and see them?This old Li was a farmer when I jumped in the queue, and was entrusted to take care of my house building.After I received the call, I seized the Spring Festival holiday and flew excitedly to Hunan to go to the construction site to see the goods, but I was disappointed.The green bricks he was talking about were green bricks, but few of them could be regarded as upright. Once collided during transportation, either the edges were missing or the corners were damaged, and they became round slag balls.It seems that the kiln temperature is not in place, and many bricks will produce powder when they are kneaded. Even if they are used to build a pigsty, they may not be reliable.And the colors of the bricks are mixed, and it was a hybrid sow that gave birth to a litter of five-flowered babies-could it be to build camouflage fortifications for the artillery?

Lao Li saw my disappointment and was ashamed of his carelessness. He said with embarrassment that the old kilns for firing blue bricks were all abandoned, and the potters who were familiar with the old ways were dying, and the old ones were getting old, and the craftsmanship had been lost.The litter of five-flowered youngsters he bought was specially burnt by a potter after exhausting his efforts in neighboring counties. Is there no one to pass on the old craftsmanship? He said that machine-made red bricks are used to build houses now, because the price is cheap, the quality is stable, and the production speed is fast.Red bricks have already taken over the entire market, so it is natural that old craftsmanship cannot make money for meals.

I said, then return it. He was even more anxious, saying that returning the goods would definitely not work, because the money had already been paid when the goods were delivered, and they would still spit out the money they had eaten? At the beginning of building the house, it was a mess, and tens of thousands of bricks were wasted by fake potters.I had no choice but to swallow this bitterness, and I had to make an expedient and distribute the bricks to the craftsmen to build walls, pave roads, or pad ditches.Now that the fake and inferior green bricks have become semi-waste, some nearby villagers also heard the news and moved some secretly to repair the pigsty or lay the foundations.

I remember that some people in the city used green bricks to build houses. After calling to ask, they realized that it was no longer a building material, but a decorative material. Leaving aside the transportation costs, the price of the bricks alone was already impressive. Take a deep breath.Only then did I know that nostalgia requires cost. Once the cost rises, the tradition becomes the monopoly of the rich. For example, when the poor fall in love with the red bricks of the rich, the rich fall in love with the blue bricks of the poor; When the rich eat fish, the rich order wild vegetables; when the poor wear the rich man's leather shoes, the rich stare at the cloth shoes excitedly... The market is redistributing tastes and customs, so that the poor and the rich People exchange venues aesthetically.

I once said at a symposium: The so-called human nature includes both emotions and desires.Emotions are mostly associated with things in the past, and desires are mostly connected with things in the future, so emotions are mostly conservative, and desires are mostly seeking newness.For example, if a person is lustful and greedy for pleasure, it is very likely that he will see different things in the infinite beauty of spring—this is desire.But a person who misses his mother will never hope that her frequent plastic surgery will change ever-changingly.Even if the mother turned into a beautiful woman on the operating table, it would be inconceivable, because is that still a mother?Can it still cause memories and distress in our hearts? ——This is emotion, or in other words, people's constant demand for emotional symbols.

This era is changing too fast, and the economic frenzy that cannot be slowed down and braked is eradicating all old things, including old manners, old customs, old clothes, old diets and old expressions.In a sense, this makes us desire too much but have too little emotion, yearn too much but remember too little, and become cultural orphans who have lost their mothers. However, people are people after all.Human emotions always have to be revived tenaciously, and at some point, hibernating emotional seeds will break through the ground and grow.Perhaps, some kind of cultural nostalgia among urbanites is just that businessmen are sensitive to the commercial value of emotion, quickly take over emotion, rapidly develop emotion, and promote the desire, commercialization, and consumerization of emotion.They not only produced expensive black bricks, but also sold expensive calligraphy and paintings, plaques, antiques, teahouses, courtyard houses, Ming-style furniture, etc., turning cultural mothers into expensive ladies or queens in ancient costumes at high prices. The prodigal sons who returned home paid the bill one by one.

This is of course a double whammy for the underdogs in the market: Not only do they not have the right to fulfill their desires, but they also lose the right to emotional memory, so they can only stand outside the price barrier and cannot get close to their expensive mothers.