Chapter 41 postscript

The first paragraph of "Ming Pao" was published in the first issue of "Ming Pao" on May 20, 1959.This novel was published for about three years, that is, it was written for three years.These three years were the most difficult stage for the initial establishment of Ming Pao.When re-editing, in almost every paragraph of the story, I thought of the scene of working hard with several colleagues back then. "Sculpture of the Gods" attempts to use the role of Yang Guo to express the constraints of the world's etiquette and customs on people's hearts and behaviors.Rituals and customs are temporary, but when they exist, they have great social power.The concept that teachers and students cannot get married certainly does not exist in the minds of modern people, but it was a matter of course in the era of Guo Jing and Yang Guo.But is it possible that the many rules and customs that we take for granted today will be considered meaningless hundreds of years from now?

Social behavior patterns such as moral norms, codes of conduct, customs and habits often change with the times, but people's character and feelings change very slowly.The joy, sorrow, nostalgia, and sorrow of three thousand years ago are still not significantly different from the emotions of people today.Personally, I always feel that in novels, human character and feelings are more important than social significance.Guo Jing said: "For the country and the people, the great chivalrous man" still has great positive significance today.But I firmly believe that in the future, the boundaries of countries will be eliminated. At that time, concepts such as "patriotism" and "resisting the enemy" will not have much meaning.However, the family affection, pure friendship, love, sense of justice, benevolence, courage to help others, dedication to society and other emotions and virtues between parents and children, I believe that people will praise them for a long time in the future. This does not seem to be any political theory, economic systems, social reforms, religious beliefs, etc. can be replaced.

The stories in martial arts novels inevitably have excessive bizarreness and coincidences.I have always hoped to achieve that martial arts can be impossible in fact, but human character should always be possible.Yang Guo and Xiao Longnv's parting and reunion is very strange, it seems to be attributed to God's will and coincidence, but in fact it must be attributed to their own personalities.If the two hadn't been so deeply in love, they would never have jumped into the valley one by one; if the little dragon girl hadn't been indifferent by nature, it would have been difficult to live alone at the bottom of the valley for a long time; Never regret.Of course, if the bottom of the valley is not a pool but a rock, the two people will be buried in the same hole after jumping off.Things in the world are always changing, success or failure depends on chance, luck, luck and misfortune, but in the final analysis, it is always determined by each person's original personality.

There is no such strange bird as Shendiao in the real world.In Madagascar, Africa, there is an "elephant bird" (Aepyornistitan), which is more than ten feet tall and weighs more than a thousand pounds. It is the largest bird in the world and became extinct around 1660 AD.Elephant birds have extremely thick legs and are too heavy to fly.Elephant bird eggs are six times larger than ostrich eggs.I've seen fossilized bird eggs in a New York museum, bigger than the sides of a small coffee table.But this bird believes that intelligence must be very low. The changes in the revised version are not very big, mainly to fix some loopholes in the original work.

May 1976