Chapter 27 "The Stealer in the Rye" - This Generation

Let’s talk about the digression first—of course, there must be a serious grammatical error in saying this. We have always had more than 50 introductory texts in this group of detective mystery novels on Facebook (the years are so fast!) A code of ethics that does not imply the merits of the case has always been a digression.Well, let's start with the off-topic off-topic this time. The above few words, which are like prophecies and poems, are obviously allused to Mr. Don Quixote who "adventurously travels in the infinite land" written by Cervantes, but I am quoting from a strange short story by my neighbor Zhu Tianxin. Novel "La Mancha", this strange novel takes "death visits this life only once, so you should prepare for its coming" as the proposition, echoing the poetic style of her previous "old soul" spying on death The short masterpiece "Chronicle of Predicting Death" (even more strange novels, the whole novel is a poem) is a halfway stop in Zhu Tianxin's silent development of her novel's death theory, and it foretells her "Wandering" in which she really looks out for the wind and chases Tieshi for love in the future. "Six articles."

How do you prepare for your own death?It is very humble, humble enough to become a neurotic death preparation-the wallet, in fact, is the contents of the wallet, not just dirty dental floss, bad business cards, inexplicable colored paper clips, and canned drinks "Again A can of "pull rings" and so on; then clean underwear, not torn turmeric, but also can vividly explain its owner; finally, the location, the place of sudden collapse and death, cannot be guessed Even if you just walk through it, you won’t be able to say anything after you die... Not the posthumous name that Confucius worried about, but the clean underwear.

It is reasonable to think about it seriously, but it is still a strange thought of death that flies out of the sky. After three years, I saw it again in this book "The Thief in the Rye". I especially wrote down its page number, P136, that is When Rodenbaud was detained as a murder suspect, he told his money-loving policeman friend Lei that there was no beginning and no end: "My mother used to tell me to wear clean underwear, just in case. Hit by a car." When I saw Rodenbahl’s words, I suddenly felt a strange feeling of sadness and fatigue—sorrow and fatigue are inexplicably wrong physiological reactions, and it is reasonable to say that it should be gratification or even a smile is.I'm pretty sure Bullock has never read "The Man of La Mancha", and it's impossible for Zhu Tianxin to go to New York to play Mrs. Rodenbaud's earnest admonition to her dear young son. Concepts such as "books" are separated by thousands of miles of oceans and all living beings, and there is a special voice that is slightly uncomfortable for ordinary people's ears, which is strangely connected with each other.

Across vastness, isolation, a world where people and things are often clogged and isolated as if they could no longer be indivisible monads, our dialogue simultaneously embodies the dualistic nature of "disconnection/communication", or more realistically, rather, everywhere Struggling to seek the possibility of reconnecting the dialogue in the midst of the break is like floating alone on the flood of forty days and nights, and the dove brings back a new olive leaf. Walter Benjamin had a plan or a whim that he could not carry out because he committed suicide in despair at the age of forty-eight: he had always dreamed of writing an article, complete with quotations from the first word to the last.

This is certainly not the cheap, lazy sleight-of-hand of today's so-called postmodern collages (for which I'm only thankful that no Andy Warhol of uninformed literary thinking has yet popped up to ruin this book. Yamin’s beautiful ultimate thought, at one time, I was most afraid of reckless action is the American Susan Sontag, but the lingering worry of "not yet" is still like a dark cloud from time to time), but , I would rather think of it as a unified field theory that Einstein struggled for forty or fifty years in the physics world, except that it knows that what it is facing is not just a simple unity and a single explanation of magnetism, electricity and gravity (The most troublesome thing is this gravitational force) is only a partial physical world, but the ultimate and incomparable "complete/broken" world of human thinking dialogue.Therefore, even if he is Benjamin, who is obsessed with books, erudite and good at sayings, no one can freely enter and exit every "industry" in the field of thinking like him, and is not afraid of the mysterious flight of thinking. An answer to Einstein's concise and smooth equation that unifies everything, encompasses everything, and expresses everything. What Benjamin dreamed of accomplishing is rather a "one-time" experimental sample, a list of paradigms, and a method of weaving limited thinking fragments.

No matter how much you are aware of, or how many times you bump into the thick walls that block the thick divisions, people who think and talk, you must still retain and firmly believe that we are facing the "same" world as a whole-"Stand Giant Seeing the world from the shoulders” seems to be a possible way to carry on the thinking dialogue from generation to generation, except that the giant-like thing we used to prop up the distance turned out to be just a loose pile of shredded paper, and we tremblingly tried to climb up. But step by step, we found gaps and holes everywhere, and we got stuck in it, exhausted quickly.

The Benjamin of the scavengers is just such a collector of shredded paper, but he is not like his fellow public librarian Umberto Eco, who is the old bureaucrat's nothing that is impossible, and he is only responsible for preserving , placing and displaying the fragments (Eco apparently used his authority to create fake fragments of paper for his own amusement), Benjamin carefully inspected, pondered, edited, and even acted as a translator in the messy human language that has been messed up (in reality , Benjamin was the first to translate Proust into German, and Baudelaire)—Benjamin was obsessed with the whole of the world, and believed that these scraps of paper were ultimately oriented toward the same whole The description, thinking and questioning of the world stand in different positions and angles, follow different approaches, use different languages, and use sounds with different frequencies and wavelengths that are only heard by different specific ears.

The hardest of these, the shift and unification of frequency, is almost mystical. "Picking flowers from all over the world to make honey, I don't know if it will be successful or not?" Einstein fought hard for his unification until he was eighty years old with gray hairs, but Benjamin was only 48 years old when he faced a more difficult task. Brecht said that this was an irreparable loss that Hitler brought to the German literary world. He was not completely right, it was an irreparable loss to mankind. Back to our clean underwear when we face the visit of death——Zhu Tianxin recently told me that Taipei City has really become more beautiful, with trees, new sidewalks, some motorcycles are withdrawn to the motorcycle bend, and maybe there is also the seasonal Xiao Suo The depression is deserted, and the street scene is clean and clear. It seems that Taipei City has changed into clean underwear, and is ready to deal with the death that will hit our faces at any time.

In any case, I always picture a large group of children playing in a field of wheat.Thousands and thousands of children, with no one around—I mean no adults—except me.And I was standing on the edge of a very steep cliff.what am i doingI have to catch every kid that runs towards the cliff - I mean if they're running and not paying attention to where they're running, then I get out of the cliff and catch them, that's what I do all day long thing.I'm going to be a catcher in the rye.I know that's crazy, but it's something I really want to do.I know that's crazy. This quotation, for our "four-character prefix" generation that is gradually aging today, enough people can recognize that it is from Salinger's famous novel "The Catcher in the Rye", and even know that it is Jia Mr. Chang'an's translation (the best translation at the time), although the last time I read this novel was a finger count, it was thirty years ago.

This passage, the origin of the title of the book, comes from the mouth of the first-person narrator Holden in the novel, but when I was in the first year of high school (1973), I was more impressed and more excited because the novel was dropped out of school at the beginning Halton, standing far away on the top of a small hill, watching the intercollegiate football game below dully, said that the weather in December was "as cold as an old witch's teat". The Catcher in the Rye, logically it should be called the catcher of the rye or the guardian of the rye. Even if it is compared to the defensive position on the baseball field, Holden wants to do the kind of thing that stops children, catches them, and prevents them from falling off the cliff. Rather, it is closer to the duties of an outfielder, but the somewhat reckless mistranslation of "catcher in the rye" is a better translation.The catcher, the heaviest and hardest worker on the field in uniform, just as a famous catcher in the American Major League pointed out, in a nine-man defense, there is only one catcher, and he has to watch alone and with his back. The eight people are in completely different directions, so that he becomes a person who looks at the audience, a sober person who is alone and does not blink-thus, this play in the wheat field has the sonorous, focused, and forgetful nature of hitting the ball. So, even the twilight time-delayed imagery of twilight ("There's no such thing as a kid's field baseball in the bottom of the nine innings, just the sound of mom with a stick telling you to come home for dinner."), on top of that, Or there is Van Gogh's crow croaking and flying overhead, guarding, with an ominous tenderness.

Here, it is too solemn and correct to translate it into the catcher in the rye, and the catcher in the rye is simpler and more fruitful (the two are often two sides of the same body), and it becomes a poem through the fine-tuning of Benjamin's frequency.Therefore, the new Rodenbahr novel we have in hand, The Burglar in the Rye, which pays tribute to the master Salinger, cannot be called "The Thief in the Rye", but can only be called "The Thief in the Rye" according to the tune. Get on the same receiving channel and become the guardian of the guardian in this square game ball game in the wheat field. The kind praying mantis catches the cicada, and the more kind-hearted oriole follows. "Poetic" by Raymond Aron For a long time, Rodenbaud has indeed continued to play the role of the night guardian of New York City in a sense, although his original intention was self-stealing, and he always made the process of justice repayment protruding and messy. , Make a ghost look like a last resort.But in the case of "The Thief in the Rye" this time, he was serious, firm, and unyielding from the beginning, like a brave man full of wit and wit, just because this time it was about a great legendary novelist, he had to A skilled thief came to guard him, and it was rare for Rodenbaud to repeat the same passage twice in such a serious manner-this man wrote such a book and changed our entire generation, I always feel that I owe him order something. This person is Salinger (in the novel he changed his name to Gulliver Filbo). Such a book that changed an entire generation is "The Catcher in the Rye". Our generation also owes him something. It’s a pity that we don’t have the chance to repay him like Rodden Barr, but we can turn around and pay back to the best Taiwanese novelists of our generation. They have different specifications but they all did it silently. Something similar to Salinger. Interestingly, one of Rodenbahr's remarks in the novel was said to Gulliver Fyrebo himself, who was coming as a customer of the Incarnation Bookstore. Will this book change my life because of it?It is conceivable that Fei Erbo was a little embarrassed, but he replied that he did not lie, that he had indeed read this book like everyone else (nonsense!), and his life was indeed changed by this book. Today, Salinger's name is closely connected with "The Catcher in the Rye", and he is almost understood as a "one-book author". Lanny and Zooey, like "A Good Day to Watch Bananafish" and so on, but the brilliance of "Catcher in the Rye" is too dazzling, it takes everything away, and even pushed Salinger himself to an embarrassing peak prematurely (He was only about thirty years old at the time), and gradually forced Salinger away from New York and the crowd, and finally hid in a small town by the Connecticut River, living a complete hermit life-of course, Salinger His reclusion is not only due to reputation, he also has a deeper reason for his thinking. Salinger participated in the Second World War and went to the European battlefield. "The Catcher in the Rye" was written after he was discharged from the war. A distraught, six-foot-two-and-a-half-inch boy who was expelled from Pantheon Preparatory School in Argus East, Pennsylvania, "with the axe" and left on Christmas Eve to return home to New York, but had to go back What is there to return to my home?There, awaiting him the inevitable rage and punishment of his parents, only a beautiful, intelligent, "makes me laugh half to death every time," Penelope, like a sparkling dot, beckons him—the Of course, Penelope is not Holden's chaste wife who "weaves by day and unravels by night", but his little sister Phoebe who is only in elementary school, the only person in this world who makes Holden smile when he talks about it. Therefore, in the short distance from Pennsylvania to New York, time was delayed, and this trek journey, which was like going home and wandering, started in the form of a zipper, which was a journey of continuous beatings, frustrations, and separation Everyone's necessary lonely journey to the rhythm of normal life - he meets good people and bad people, poor nuns with good intentions, extortionate whores and pimps, loves but doesn't know his son is a big jerk ("That guy is a fucking Sensitive as a flush toilet”), a classmate’s mother, a silly country girl from the West Coast who just came to the big city in New York, a gay male teacher who cared about him but seemed to have his intentions, an ex-girlfriend who had a new boyfriend from an Ivy League university, and so on.Holden responds to these occasional good guys with well-intentioned perverse behavior and lies, if something is wrong; he deals with bad guys with submission and blue eyes, dusts his clothes, wipes his nosebleeds, and doesn't need to be shot anyway for being a coward. Halton's cowardice is half real, and the other half comes from a ghostly relationship with the world in front of him.His mind always escapes, gets confused, stays temporarily on some childish but "poetic" thoughts, like he remembers where the water ducks go when the pond in Central Park freezes in New York, like he is crazy Grieving and indignant about the girl who was "always timid to leave king chess in the last row and dare not use it when playing chess" was kidnapped by her roommate into the back seat of the car and beat her up, just like the toilet wall of the primary school he studied in Phoebe There is no time to wipe the ubiquitous dirty words, "Even if you spend a million years doing it, you can never erase half of the sentences in the world, it is simply impossible"... Even all the tears in the world can't wash away any line - this is what Omar Khayyam's "Rubaiji" said back then. The entire generation that Rodenbaud said read "The Catcher in the Rye" and changed their lives because of this, and when they grew up, they were roughly the backpack travelers who were like a gust of wind in the 1960s. When things are good and bad things happen, I taught blacks in Mississippi to vote for rights, went to slums and lived together with desperate people, sang poems, took drugs and protested loudly, and collapsed on dark street corners and roadsides. Desolate and cheap hotels, and even went out of the United States to the so-called third world, blooming and dying in foreign countries, or dying there—— "Poetry" is a word I borrowed from the French Raymond Aron. It turns out that Aron's slightly complete sentence is: "They are looking for poetry again in the name of respecting the noble actions of all people." In the novel "The Catcher in the Rye", when Holden came home from a serious illness, he finally said: I seem to miss everyone I have talked to, even like Scudlert and Akeley, I just Just for example, I think I even miss Maurice that jerk (Note: Akeley and Maurice are both people who beat Holden).That's funny, don't tell anyone anything, if you do that, you start missing everyone. What Aron said was of course the younger generation who were fighting in France at the same time in 1968, but the reasoning is roughly the same. It was after the collapse of a complete and rock-solid belief (France is Marxism, the United States, which lacks left-wing The country is the collapse of the original value of religion and society after World War II), and the younger generation, like a torpedo that has lost its target, has to seek new goals in the cold and vast sea.However, there is no alternative big ideology, and it is impossible to return to the boring real order and routine business of life, which is scattered into a series of sympathetic ideologies as Aron said, like the liberation of women, children, Black people, as well as overall human rights actions, and benevolent and loving things are on top of the environmental movement. The replacement must be goals with moral implications. However, these new goals that do have moral implications are still unavoidable. After all, they are individual rather than universal, partial rather than holistic, time-consuming but time-consuming. Not eternal, there is always a loss here, a break between the two coexisting emotions of willingness and loss, an ultimate longing for a complete or directly perfect world and eternal loss. The message is like a song, because it takes time for the wind to transmit, and it will also decay and mutate. "The Catcher in the Rye" and its related messages of this generation have crossed the vast Pacific Ocean and reached our ears. It has been almost a decade late. The above has become a strange, but also impressive intermittent noise, a small and attractive window in our generation who are struggling to grow up and enlightenment. In the closed and condensed air of the island country at that time, apart from studying abroad, not many of us were able to pack our bags and really go away, but we were somewhat different because of this, a little bit disappointed, and it was more difficult than the poverty and closedness of thirty years ago. The imaginative generation is complex and difficult to manage, but it is not as clear, efficient, unencumbered, and rational (of course, more often than not) as the next generation fifty years later. We have Horton-like cowardice, fragility, and absent-mindedness. We can't get rid of our doubts about the value and significance of fighting hard in the real world. It's not easy to go all out, so we're not good at it and seem to retreat easily. Beat Generation, generally translated as the lost generation, the beat generation, but from the perspective of the real world, it seems to be more expressive when translated directly into the "beaten generation" like Holden - we are really like Holden It can't be further improved, only one Chinese subject is passed, and the other six subjects are all passed, suitable for storytelling and novel writing (Forty years ago, this generation of Taiwanese novelists is really the peak of Taiwan's novel writing, and looking at the situation in front of you, you can't wait. The recovery may be decades away, at least in our observable future), but we are too weak to win in the "unpoetic" reality. History has not tolerated us, and it seems that it is ready to grab our sore spots and sprinkle salt on our sore spots, just like Napoleon III, a power-grabbing master who was summed up in mediocrity in the European generation in 1848, and who is full of spies in the streets. The prime time of responsibility, as Chen Fangming, one of our generation, pointed out, we also let the power be put in the hands of the most mediocre and worst people in this generation-from meaning to semantics, we are indeed suffering flat generation. Chen Wenqian, who is also a member of our generation, has repeatedly expressed emotion that we should sincerely apologize to future generations. It was when we were supposed to be responsible that the entire history of Taiwan was reversed. In some election campaigns, I only chose to hold a party in Daan Forest Park in Taipei City. The name is Sorry, My Child. I'm sorry, the next generation. We left you a very bad Taiwan. You see, even the political introspection of our generation is still in the form of this generation. In the air of electoral mobilization where sticks are flying like crazy, we are still poetic, detached from the current reality, deep and naive. Both Zhu Tianxin and I were invited to participate. It was not an honor, but it was like surrendering to the execution. At the moment of writing this article, I am sitting in a Doutor cafe on Xinglong Road, two days before the execution day. I am in the cafe. The oldest one, looking at every table is full of boys and girls who are more than ten years younger than me, they quarreled with me to death, but I still kept thinking, maybe I should apologize to them one by one table by table now, They won't go to Da'an Park, and probably don't even know about it. Chasing after the wind, pleading with Tieshi, and using courtesy to savages? "This generation", these three words are really magical and unpredictable. When we were young like these boys and girls, we liked it very much, and we would throb with these three words at any time. Seeing the atmosphere of revolution, people are not lonely or desperate, and they also have an honest provocation, a look that you will know when we are a little older, who knows that thirty years later, it is more like a predestination charges. "This generation", I think of many things, including the North District (Taipei County) high school joint admissions in 1973. At that time, I left Yilan, the holy land of democracy in the future, less than two years ago, and escaped from Sanchong. I moved to Minquan East Road near the No. 1 Funeral Home (at that time, there were still rice fields and vegetable gardens between Songshan Airport and Songshan Airport), and my examination room was located in Wanhua Middle School, the other end of Beishi, which I had never been to.We are extremely envious, and it is precisely because of our envy that we can remember to this day. The title of the composition of the girls in that year was the poetic "this generation", unlike the topic of our boys' composition, which was the so-called "promote the team spirit" that Jiang Jingguo announced to the whole people. — This memory is like a fable today. After another year or so, I got to know Zhu Tianxin and started to talk to each other. Only then did I know that Zhu Tianxin's examination room was in Huajiang Girls' High School that year, separated by a wall from mine. This essay title is called "this generation". If Zhu Tianwen and Zhang Dachun were not in this year, I would not know it. Chen Wenqian would not know that she is in a green uniform and black skirt in Taichung Girls' High School. But I believe that Zhu Tianxin and Lei Qian who are the same age as me All should be remembered.