Chapter 14 "Everybody Dies" - Walking City

I finished reading this book while traveling in Kyoto, Japan. The small commercial hotel I live in is in Shijo Kawaramachi. Every morning, I walk five minutes to Doutor at the end of Kamogawa Shijo Bridge to eat hot dog bread and a cup of cheap coffee for 180 yen for breakfast. This is the best newly opened hotel The coffee shop is the biggest surprise of this trip. From the bright floor-to-ceiling windows, you can look directly at the clean and snow-covered Mount Hiei in the first month. Usually, the breakfast time will be quite long.I always stay where I am after I finish my coffee and read Bullock until my moral sense reminds you that it is time to leave, then I go around the four bridges and join the Morning Fishermen on the Other Bank (a kind of small three- to five-inch flat soup soup) fish) and seagulls going to the inland for winter shelter, sitting on the bank of the river and continuing to read——In Kyoto, I have an advantage. , you can stay out of the picture, look at the city as a novel in progress, and you can even secretly think that you are like Matthew Scudder.

The Big Brother, which should be quite annoying, is "not a man's phone" as Mickey Ballou said in the book, but unexpectedly brings another style to the city.Almost all the faithful men and women in Kyoto are walking with one hand, and they are not hesitating to talk while walking (it’s strange that there are so many things to talk about). Therefore, the Japanese, who are used to keeping a straight face under the national total employment system, suddenly have bright and rich expressions When you get up, Big Brother seems to lift a veil, or it should be said that it directly turns the street in the public domain into a private personal living room, and spreads the thoughts that were originally only in the solitary space to the public.

Well, the title of Bullock's book is indeed not deceiving, killing people is like a river of hemp and blood. Therefore, reading around in Kyoto, an ancient capital with good law and order, does have a strange sense of time and space misplacement.People here, before the normal death comes (and it comes very late, because the Japanese who eat natto and fish have always been the longest-lived in progressive countries, especially women), they are basically only threatened by one kind of death ——Too elegant, too elegant, elegant to death. I remember one time when the cherry blossom festival came to Kyoto in April. On the way of philosophy, an important cherry blossom viewing spot in Kyoto, we occasionally saw a warning sign. From the mixed Chinese characters in the middle of the sentence, we could vaguely tell that it was a warning to single women to walk carefully here. .Someone in the same industry asked in surprise, what should we be careful about?The answer I got was that I was afraid of encountering a philosopher, so I talked non-stop.

And this time I went to Kyoto again, the closest criminal on the journey, except for the boring gangster who appeared at the intersection of Shijo and Kawaramachi on time every night to disturb people's dreams, was only myself——I accidentally picked up a criminal on the Shijo Bridge. To a brand-new men's watch, it is a black and white French brand Agnes b.This brand always reminds me of Agnes, the beautiful woman in Milan Kundera, who was grown from a gesture in a swimming pool. Therefore, I have the determination to take revenge for the eight-year war of resistance and the recovery of Taiwanese comfort women. , I didn’t hand it over to the Jiaofan (police station) near the bridge, and donated it to my daughter who always wanted to be a boy in the same industry.

It’s a good thing that Matthew Scudder doesn’t live in Kyoto, otherwise he might just be an old homeless man who puts up advertising billboards for karaoke or sex hotels on the street, and earns two small money to buy a glass of sake. If there are no major accidents (for example, Taiwan's economic situation suddenly collapsed overnight), Taiwan will not turn around and walk all the way into an island full of cities, every minute and every second, the city is like an amoeba, constantly Extend its pseudopodia outward.This is not easy to detect in daily life, but the occasional train ride is a very effective observation tool.For example, I personally take the Ziqiang to return to my hometown Yilan every two or three years. Therefore, the memory of the scenery outside the car window in my mind is always waiting to be updated a few years ago, and the way of updating is always The same pattern: the poor mountains and rivers or the delicate rice fields recede, new concrete houses grow out, and stores selling goods appear on the edge of the original town in memory, filling up the gaps between the original houses, and more What is common is that the dusty new roads and new bridges are inserted into the green field like probes, like scout troops who do not turn back.

What can Taiwanese novelists write? When mainland novelists visited Taiwan last year, I was invited to participate in a small dialogue between novelists from both sides of the Taiwan Strait organized by United Literature (until now, I still don’t understand why I was on the invited list). The second unit of the discussion outline is The subject matter of the novel, of course, is the most exciting moment for mainland novelists and the most jaw-dropping moment for Taiwanese novelists, especially when Mo Yan began to casually tell the story of ghost foxes in the mountains and plains in his hometown of Gaomi, Shandong, I glanced aside Zhang Dachun, who sat blankly with bright eyes, remembered that many years ago when García Márquez swept the Taiwanese novel circle, everyone was desperately looking for absurd titles, so that imitating Márquez would also come up with a magical and realistic novel, the sharp Zhang Dachun was ahead of his peers When I was the first to find Lanyu and write his "The Last Prophet", the words that came to my mind were: It's really hard for you, child.

Although the countryside is nice, it seems that it is definitely not a place where Taiwanese novelists may live for a long time. However, in general, novel writing in Taiwan at this stage is still hovering in the so-called "pre-urban period".We are a generation that has seen or participated in (from a country where fate or time crowds into a city) a generation that is still struggling with this change in life that we most likely also realize will not return ——As long as it is a linear trend that does not turn back, it is always easy to become the object of resistance for people, especially creative thinkers who are not willing to give in, just like people throughout the ages are still fighting against the endless loss of youth or love.

Therefore, the city has become more or less a symbol for us, we have to live in it, but we don't really enter it, we keep an idea in our hearts to escape from it as long as we have a way (from Most literally, one day I will buy a garden villa in the countryside, and return to nature with dogs and horses in the ultimate enlightenment of life, etc.), such an idea can easily find support and courage in human thinking and memory—the city is literature The inn of the religious is the evil world and Sodom and Gomorrah of the religious mind, the human zoo of psychologists, and the highly evil and decadent form of capitalism for Marxist believers and practitioners.

The confrontation with clear barriers clearly cuts a trench. Here, revolutionary slogans and battle poems are suitable for breeding, because when the two armies confront each other, they need higher volume decibels and more concise and powerful language forms to penetrate the distance like throwing guns to reach the other side. .The eloquent nature of the novel, and its special growth conditions, which depend on the fruitful fragments of real life, make its practitioners more like peasants than brightly armored warriors, and the farmer, as we know, cultivates in smooth and predictable days It was only possible here, and when the war started, they had no choice but to flee.

This reminds me of the famous novelist Zhong Acheng's wonderful but easily misunderstood "surrender theory" under the righteousness of the nation. Acheng once cited the tragic history after the Qing soldiers entered the customs as an example. He believed that the price of such stubborn resistance was The stagnation of history and basic social life has made the relationship between people and the land empty. This is of course the peasant's point of view: "If you don't surrender, you won't be able to plant seeds." If you can’t plant the seeds, you have to choose to leave. This is Zhan Yihong’s choice in Chen Yingzhen’s "Night Truck". He resolutely returned to his hometown in the south and the beautiful time and space that has not been swallowed by the city for the time being; he chose to surrender and take the city as his own. Home is our Matthew Scudder, Elaine Maddie, and Mickey Ballou, who have the ability to choose to leave when death approaches again and again (Ireland, Paris, France) or anywhere like Texas, etc.), but as Elaine Madai says in chapter 13, "I understand, this is home".

However, whether the surrender is established or not is not only related to the willingness of the surrenderer, but also the sincerity and compromise of the recruiter. From this point of view, Greater Taipei City is indeed a very unqualified recruiter for novels. Just imagine , a city that cannot walk, how can it claim that it accepts you? I have always firmly believed that a city that cannot walk cannot grow novels. Even if you are only traveling, if you are going to a place with natural scenery, generally speaking, you have to choose a vehicle as a means of transportation, because the stars and fields are wide and the landscape changes less; but if it is a city, you'd better choose to walk, because businesses, The windows, the street view, and of course the people who are also part of the landscape are too dense and change too much, and the vehicle is relatively too fast a means of transportation, so that you have no time to lock on any focus you want to see clearly, such a whistling However, it can only be generalized for you to write a short essay on landscape impressions without pain or itching, and there is no chance for a good prose. You have to soak in it, and the best way to soak in the city is to walk, roam, and stop every now and then. As famous as Bullock, Tony Schillerman, the master of contemporary detective novels who wrote the Navajo Indian detective Joe Leaphorn (Joe Leaphorn, beating antlers), set his story in the sparsely populated Indian state of Arizona. It is always said in novels set on a reserved area, "Here, everyone knows everything about everyone." This is exactly the opposite description of the city, and the thing that Lefeng least adapts to the big white city is always: you see So many people, you are so close to so many people, but people avoid eye contact, you don't know their names, their affairs, you don't even talk. This is the reason why urban novels are more difficult to write, and also why it requires a longer immersion time.In the city, people are fragmented, and information and stories are also fragmented. Clues are always swallowed by the crowd around a corner, and writers and thinkers are like frustrated detectives chasing down a dead end. He has too many fragments of information and ideas that are overwhelming but always floating in irrelevance. You have to wander patiently and pretending to have nothing to do, so as to find the link that does not necessarily appear or exist, and seek enlightenment. No wonder Benjamin has repeatedly used scavengers and street spies as metaphors for city writers, and said that they work in the same posture, walking, roaming, stopping at any time to pick up things, and still fucking in solitude when the residents are sleeping soundly. own business.Benjamin, who turned material Marxism into the realm of the poet’s soul, even quoted Marx’s statement that labor time and labor quantity determine the value of labor, saying that the labor time and labor quantity invested by such wanderers are infinite, so he also created a nearly Infinite labor value. However, these labor hours and labor volumes must have a labor place to bet on. This labor place is of course a street—but it must be a street that people can walk on, not a street that is only for vehicles to walk on, like Taipei City. As keen as Benjamin, of course it is impossible to ignore this point. In his book "Lyric Poets in the Age of Advanced Capitalism", in fact, Benjamin also specifically listed some creators' almost neurotic guarding and impatience about walking in the city. angry.Like Baudelaire, he accused Brussels, which he hated, not because it was inconvenient to walk, but because "there are no shop windows! Promenades are something that imaginative peoples love, and this is impossible in Brussels, where the streets are empty." Empty and useless." Or like Stevenson, whose panic was that the gas lamps that illuminate the streets of London at night were being scrapped and replaced with neon ones, so it wasn't that there were no lights to make nocturnal wandering impossible, but merely a replacement. The neon lights lack the gas lights that light up slowly from weak to strong, and the gradual dimming of the sky to form a rather touching and poetic scene. This little loss is enough to make Stevenson look at the neon lights like the end of the world. Mouth the evil words, "This light should only illuminate murder and crime in public places, or in the corridors of madhouses, it only adds to the terror of horror". For the creators who live in Taipei City with almost nowhere to go, this can only be called "why not eat minced meat".Sometimes you can't help but want Baudelaire and Stevenson to come and live in Taipei City for ten days and half a month, wondering what more vicious things they will say. Of course, as far as city walking is concerned, Taipei City does have inherent misfortune that is irresistible to manpower.I am referring to its weather part - the subtropical island and the complete basin terrain give Taipei a typical hot, humid and rainy climate. When you walk, you will sweat and get tired easily. Three hundred and sixty-five a year There are not many days suitable for walking. Otherwise, it's mostly man-made.Here, let’s not talk about the urban landscape, the air and noise, the green spaces and street trees, the traffic and parking conditions, the public security and the general quality of public construction, and even the deputy leaders who go home to eat lunch and block the road Wait, anyone can list hundreds of problems, let's just look at the material of the sidewalk and the right of way. It is conservatively estimated that the materials of sidewalks in Taipei City are more than 20 years behind the times.The thin red brick with the money pattern (really like a metaphor full of cynical mockery) currently used, if I remember correctly, was still used by Gao Yushu (God, do you remember this name?) when he was the mayor.This luxurious material of the Cambrian and Cretaceous era in Taipei City is fragile and ugly, plus we like to park motorcycles and cars on it, and the cement under the thin red bricks is always uneven. Therefore, As a result, the artificial lake area with the largest number and highest density on the surface of the earth is formed, and many of the lakes are still trap-like artificial lakes hidden under the red bricks in the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark". When walking in rainy winter days, you have to have Indiana · Dr. Jones' excellent judgment to decide which piece to step on and which one is absolutely unacceptable - the only difference is that Dr. Jones who successfully passed has a priceless archaeological treasure, but you don't, you have to go home and take a hot bath And change into a set of clean clothes. Our concept of the right of way was also twenty years ago, and still retains the ancient class consciousness that "vehicles represent power" at that time, so the sidewalks are narrow and small, and many lots are not even available at all, and they are always the last ones when repairing; moreover The symbol of successfully retaining this kind of class consciousness is that we still retain and use overpasses and pedestrian underpasses, which means that machines with powerful horsepower walk on flat roads, but people have to climb up and down. This is not the ancient society Darwin What are the vestiges of the era of communism? The last two mayors Chen Shui-bian and Ma Ying-jeou have actively promoted the literary atmosphere in Taipei City, and used money to set up literary awards to encourage writing, but sometimes you really want to tell them the truth, don’t have to bother, don’t bother the news office or worry about it. Even the establishment of the Cultural Bureau, this kind of thing can be done by the basic responsibility of the ready-made Public Works Bureau. Make the streets so that people can walk on them safely. Once you build it, literature will come soon. And the more extravagant point is not what Mayor Ma can or should do, that is, Taipei City is still a growing city, but it has grown up badly like bad teenagers, but it is not a city that has experienced disasters ( Although this may be too fast), so it lacks some kind of boundary of thinking, some kind of vision that can look beyond the space-time skyline. We can say that people's literary and artistic creations are always directly or indirectly aware of their own death, and thus seek some effective or futile life form that resists time.Life and death also exist in cities. I personally always think that there is a difference between a person standing on the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower and the top of the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Building in front of Taipei Railway Station.That prosperous city of the century, you know that it died overnight in the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and the German invasion in World War II, you realize its fragility, and you know that it may also die in the next moment Burn it up or be wiped out. Therefore, the prosperity in front of its eyes and the warm lights that call people home are no longer just a thin layer of prosperity and lights. It is a life itself that cannot be separated from you. You have an almost miraculous connection to it, but you still lose it, so you want to remember it all the more. This is the "Deer Ming" in the Book of Songs, "Tokyo Menghualu" and "Luoyang Jialan Ji". Of course Brock's too.