These four idioms may be related to literature and the life of literature.They are: "creating something out of nothing", "mystery", "sitting on the sky" and "doing nothing". Create something out of nothing. In a sense, literature is something out of nothing.The ability to create something out of nothing is the basic ability of literature.It can also be said that creating something out of nothing is a realm that literature pursues unswervingly throughout its life. Due to the endless spiritual desire and endless creative life impulse, human beings already have an extremely large, rich and splendid spiritual world - the second world.God created the first world, and humans created the second world.This is not a world of facts, but a blank world of infinite possibilities. What to create is not inevitable, but free.We're going to leave an article written by the Creator and write another article entirely from our own hands.God is the creator, and we are the "quasi-creators".The world in front of us is neither the mountains, rivers, villages and fields, nor the noisy human world given by the Creator, but just a white void, "nothing".But we want to let images and stories grow out of this white void—these images and stories actually grow on our boundless hearts.

We can say to the Creator: You write your article, I write mine. Emptiness, nothingness, like a white wall—a white wall with no height to the top and no sides to the side.We have painted endless, wonderful, and incredible mental images onto this white wall that will never peel off or collapse.Today, this white wall is colorful and beautiful, with scenes of heaven and hell on it... This world has become an inseparable part of human spiritual life. This world is not induced, but the result of conjecture and deduction.It is new myth, and it may be prophecy.Here, what we have to do is to give form to all possibilities.The only shortcoming of this world is that it cannot intersect with our physical world, but can only enter our spiritual world.Our feet cannot enter it, but our soul can fully integrate into it.It cannot be verified, but we firmly believe in it.

To create something out of nothing is to weave and to lie. Lawrence repeatedly said: "The artist is a damned liar, but his art, if it is art, will tell you the truth about his time." And the most personal expression of this idea is done by Nabokov of: "A child running out of a Neanderthal canyon yelling 'Wolf is coming,' with a big bad wolf behind him -- that's not literature; a child yelling 'Wolf is coming,' No wolves - that's literature. It was pure chance that the poor little guy was actually eaten by wolves because he lied so many times, but what matters is this: wolves in the overgrown grass and exaggerated There is a colorful filter and a pair of prisms between the wolves in the story. This is the artistic means of literature.... We can also say this: the magic of art lies in the wolf that the child intentionally fabricated, that is, the wolf he created on purpose. Wolf hallucinations; and his mischief constitutes a successful story. He was finally eaten by wolves, and since then, sitting by the campfire to tell this story, has taken on a warning color. But the child is a child. A magician is an inventor."

The writer should be the kid herding sheep. Mystery. To understand this idiom, you can think back to two writers who have been talked about for a long time: Borges and Calvino. Borges' perspective is always unexpected.In his life, he never chose the perspective of the public.When people crowded to one place to look at the same landscape, he always flashed in a remote and unattended angle, gazing at another landscape with those weak eyesight.He sees what others don't see, sees what others don't.He always has his own set—a set of observation methods, a set of ideas, a set of vocabulary, a set of themes...

This old man who was later blind, what he was doing while sitting on that chair was fantasy. He fantasizes about everything—the result of his fantasies is that everything is no longer an object in the eyes of us laymen. I agree with this statement that Borges' works are fairy tales written for adults.Calvino, another writer who writes fairy tales for adults, is more worthy of our attention.Every time he writes a work, he almost deliberately devises some tricks, which are completely unexpected and meaningful.I don't know any other writer in this world who has worked tirelessly throughout his life to come up with things that people have never heard of and imagined.He takes us into a world that doesn't seem to exist.This world is so weird that it makes people feel unbelievable.We always have a question: Is there a hidden world behind the state we usually see?This world has another logic, another set of movement methods, and another language of its own?

"The world is turning into stone." Italo Calvino said that the world is "stonening".We cannot bring the petrified world into our work.We cannot move.Writers do not compare strength, but smartness and wisdom.In the face of Borges and Calvino's fantasies—playing mysteries, should we get some inspiration: how should Chinese literature activate its function of focusing on some mystical issues—metaphysical issues? Sitting in the sky. Let us assume that the man sitting in the well is a wise man, what will he see?Looking at the sky from a well is at least a fresh observation angle that ordinary people cannot choose, and it is a unique way, all of which will provide us with another taste of observation and another result.

What is literature? Literature is a form in which personal experience is written. In this sense, as long as the writer respects his own personal experience and takes personal feelings as the principle when creating, then he cannot but sit in a well and watch the sky in essence. "Everyone will get different experiences in different time and space backgrounds." This is almost a common sense question.Many years ago, a working girl often came to Peking University to listen to my lectures. She told me that one of her favorite things to do in winter nights when she was a child was to help the family wash dishes.I think this is so weird.Washing dishes is the last thing many of us want to do, so the dishwasher was invented.She explained that when she was a child, her family was very poor, so poor that she couldn't afford clam oil for a few cents a box, so she wanted to find a little greasy feeling on the back of dry hands by washing dishes.I would venture to assert that this experience was unique to her.

We have no reason not to care about our own experience.We should base our writings on our own experience.Experience is a prerequisite that cannot be lost. When it first came out, a critic pointed out that he did not expect that I would write about the "Cultural Revolution" in this way.Because before that, when writers were involved in the "Cultural Revolution", they were always writing about collective memories: the "Cultural Revolution" of wearing hats and parading in the streets, the "Cultural Revolution" of criticizing, and the "Cultural Revolution" of squatting in cowsheds.But in fact, different people's "Cultural Revolution" is not the same.The background of this book is the "Cultural Revolution", but it is by no means the collective "Cultural Revolution" that is remembered in general works today.At that time, I was only eleven years old and had just entered middle school.My father handed me over to a female Chinese teacher.She led a group of us children across the Yangtze River to Shanghai to connect with each other, and the journey had to pass through Nantong, a small town in northern Jiangsu.At that time, my feeling was: the whole world has collapsed, and all the people have gathered in Nantong.Because of the heavy flow of people, our children are often squeezed out.The teacher was very anxious. To use Zhang Yimou's film, "one must not be missing".She often finds one child and loses the other, so she is very nervous.So, she bought a toy for each of our children on the street.It is a bird made of plastic. When it is filled with water, there is a small eye on the bird's tail. When the mouth is blown against the small eye, the water will dance in it, and it will make a joyful sound.She told us that if anyone falls behind, just stand still and blow the water bird, and she will follow the sound to find him.This works great.At that time, the boys and girls were all walking in the small town of Nantong with a water bird, which was really a scenic spot in the small town of Nantong.

Later, our series team got a collective ticket and planned to take Dongfanghong No. 1 to Shanghai.The pier was crowded with people and it was very chaotic.The teacher knew that it was impossible to keep a whole team on board.So she asked everyone to gather under the chimney after boarding the boat.The team dispersed with a bang, and everyone went their separate ways.I started to blow waterfowl desperately, but no one echoed me.I am anxious.After playing for a long time, a person finally echoed me in the distance. I didn't know how excited I was at the time, like an underground party member connecting with an organization. After a long time, I finally connected.Then, when I blew a long note, he blew a long note; when I blew a short note, he blew a short note; Let's sing together.

Later, I got on the boat and went under the big chimney, but found that my teacher and classmates were not there.With a long blast of the whistle, Dongfanghong No. 1 slowly left the river bank and drove towards the center of the river.I looked for everyone everywhere, and kept blowing water birds until my lips became numb.Finally, when we returned to the chimney, there was still no one there.At this time, I knew that I was the only one who boarded the boat today.What kind of mood would an eleven-year-old boy who has only been to the county town two or three times be alone on the Yangtze River at dusk in autumn?Of course, he is very sad.I was very impressed. I was lying on the railing and crying. It wasn't that kind of crying with grief and indignation. It seemed that there was a sweet feeling in the crying.Seeing the tears swaying with the wind, I thought it was fun, so I cried again; when I was tired from crying, I fell asleep under the big chimney.I slept until late at night, and didn't know when I woke up vaguely, so I picked up the waterfowl and continued to blow.At this time, I vaguely felt that there was someone in a vast place echoing me with waterfowl.I suspected it was a hallucination, touched the hat on my head, and then touched the luggage around me, and I was sure it was real, so I desperately ran towards the stern while blowing, and that person also desperately ran towards me.Finally, we rendezvous.Under the dim light, I saw that it was a female classmate, and the most embarrassing thing was: that girl was the one my classmates had joked about since I was in junior high school. ...

This is my Cultural Revolution. Literature must return to personal experience. A novelist's own vivid sense is probably always the most important. nothing to do. Proust, who was sick in bed, left us the impression of "doing nothing", and "doing nothing" may be the best state needed for literary writing.Works that seem to be doing nothing but actually have something to do, written from a mental state of doing nothing, will eventually stand out in the wilderness of literature after the elimination of time. There are few idle writers in the Chinese literary world, and few idle works.We are so nervous.We are always weighed down by heavy thoughts.We have improperly viewed the social function of literature, tied literature and society tightly together, and shown excessive enthusiasm for current social problems.Proust is an inspiration to us.In the state of doing nothing, he discovered many wonderful things, such as postures - postures and people's thinking, and the psychology of characters, and so on.In the book, he used a lot of words to write that people will have subtly different feelings of time in different postures: when the body is in this posture, it may recall the scene more than ten years ago, and when the body is in another When you pose, it is possible to go back to your childhood at that moment. "Napping in an armchair after dinner, that position is far from the position in sleep..." He found that position is infinitely mysterious: it may cause a change in feeling, or it may be a certain mood, a certain character revealed.Thus Proust developed a habit of analyzing human gestures.When others pay attention to the opinions and theories expressed by a person in the hall, Proust turns off his hearing and only pays attention to that person's posture.He noticed that Grandin always walked quickly when he came in and out, even in and out of the salon.It turned out that this man had been frequenting Huajie and Liuxiang for a long time, but he was always afraid of being seen, so he developed the habit of walking in such a hurry. When people are in a good place of doing nothing, they either love to think about very small problems, such as pillow problems, posture problems, and furniture problems, or they like to think about some very abstract problems as large as the world.These questions have been asked since the beginning of human history, and they are very metaphysical questions.For Proust, he thinks about these small dust-like problems with the grand ones like the world—behind those small objects, he sees eternal and everlasting problems. Writers are also intellectuals, but they are a kind of intellectuals.He not only needs to have the qualities of general intellectuals, but also needs to be clearly distinguished from general intellectuals.As an intellectual, he has the responsibility to focus on the "now".Facing the social landscape in front of him, he must speak, comment and judge. The role of the "intellectual" is prescribed: he must always be ready to engage in the "now."When an intellectual turns out to be indifferent and insensitive to various events in his environment, he has already given up his adherence to the role of "intellectual".Intellectuals are always a strong driving force in the huge state machine. However, when he is a writer, one of the intellectuals, he should put on another way of thinking.He must first understand that the work he wants to do is a special kind of work.The "present" that writers care about should include "past" and "future".He doesn't shy away from questions, but these questions transcend time and space: they existed in the past, they exist in the present, and they will still exist in the future.These problems will not disappear with the passage of time.At this moment, those trivial things with a certain time and place completely disappeared from his field of vision—he could turn a blind eye and see—in Milan Kundera’s words, “the essence of human existence.” basic state". "Writing novels should be written, this is the only reason for the existence of novels." Milan Kundera said absolutely true.