"One night I was riding home on the subway, passing through Times Square, when I suddenly heard the chirping of crickets- ", it is this big city parasite heard from the hometown of this familiar cricket insect singing, evoking Selden's long-distance nostalgia, he felt that it was from Connecticut crickets, which is compared with the modern New York Times Square to get skyscrapers, the unending torrent of people, the huge roar of the subway that comes and goes, every evening dusk, the lights of the Times Square, at this moment In a row of seats next to a newsstand in a small subway station, the weary traveler's heart fell silent, thinking back to the life of that familiar countryside, and after a few minutes, the beginnings of a story appeared in his mind.
(Why really go to Times Square, you can imagine, in your reading of the story "The Cricket in Times Square", you can put yourself in the shoes of that nostalgic cricket, look through its eyes, look at Times Square, with a "countryman's eyes", you can put yourself in the shoes of that mouse, which is a native New Yorker, from the time of its birth. A native New Yorker, familiar with every corner of the city, every dark place that many people can't perceive, and the gentle cat, you can imagine yourself as the child who guards the newsstand and sells newspapers and magazines, a curious child who can't fully understand the world, all these stories are about lovely people, and the warmth and tenderness of the stories are in the lines! That's what
If you ever do get to Times Square, you won't marvel at the huge, colorful billboards, but you'll be looking for the boy by the newsstand and the crickets singing wistful songs with him--)
Think of the poet Quicksilver's "It's the Cricket" as expressed in his book "The Cricket". Almost the same sentiment as Searle and others in this book: in the preface, the Taiwanese poet Mr. Y says: "Overseas, when I hear a cricket chirping at night, I think it is the same one I heard in the Sichuan countryside."
It's that cricket / whose steel wings beat the golden wind / that jumped across the strait / that landed quietly from the sky over Taipei / that landed in your yard / that sings night after night / it's that cricket / that sang in Bin Feng - July / that sang in Tang Feng - Cricket / that sang in Nineteen Poems of Ancient Poetry / that sang beside the loom of Hua Mulan / that sang in the lyrics of Jiang Kui / that the laborer heard / that the thinking woman listened to / it's The cricket that sang by the post road in the mountains, on the beacon of the Great Wall, on the patio of the inn, in the grass of the battlefield, for the lonely guest, for the wounded soldier, in your memory, in my memory, in the surprise of childhood, in the loneliness of middle age, in the cage made of bamboo, in the hedge of the lantern, in the mooncake, in the osmanthus blossom, in the pomegranate fruit full of pearls. I think of the yellow leaves flying in my hometown/I think of the leftover lotus in the wild pond/I think of the geese flying south/I think of the piles of haystacks in the fields/I think of my mother calling us back to add clothes/I think of the years secretly flowing away for many, many years--
Flowing through the "Cricket in New York City's Times Square," read the strong sense of nostalgia, nostalgia, so that the stranger, the only one who has ever been in the other side of the country, briefly stayed. Do reverie, in the busyness of running around to recall the fuzzy dark memories of the countryside, the roadside in the spring full of small yellow flowers of wild vegetables, in the wind scattered globular dandelion seeds, you see off the cows and goats down the mountain, into the narrow lanes from the twisting village head, the sky's fluttering white clouds, the hedge around the peach orchard, the ridge between the gullies of the rift valley of the wild fruits on the green sour
Turning the pages of the book, reading the opening text, the mind emerges You can also turn to the illustrations by Gus Williams, and without realizing it, you become a character in the story, and you feel a sense of freedom in reading--
The first person to appear is the city's Times Square native, Tucker, a lovable, ordinary little man from the city's underbelly. Normally, when Tucker is not digging for treasure (which he calls "searching") or trying to sleep, he sits on the exit of a drainpipe and watches the world go by - or at least part of the world going by in the Times Square subway station. .
Mario's family runs a newspaper stand next to the subway, and business is dismal, income is meager, and Mario is a kid who can help his family man the stand, and he's bored with the monotonous, repetitive daily scene at the station, too, until he, like Tucker, hears a strange sound, one that Mario and Tucker haven't heard before.
"Here was a sound that Tucker knew day and night
At his age, Tucker has heard almost every sound in New York City, and he's heard the rumble of subway trains as they scrape against the tracks with a shrill shriek. He's also heard the strange noises that come from outside the bars that lead to the streets: the sound of a car's flat tire, the sound of a honking horn being held down, and the ear-splitting noise that comes from slamming on the brakes. Not only that, he had also heard the station crowded with people, that kind of crowd noise, the barking of a dog tied to the end of its owner's leash even pigeons spreading their wings, cats purring, and the sound of airplanes flying over the city had been experienced. But in this lifetime, even with the added experience of traveling across the greatest city in the world, Tucker had never heard such sounds. (We seem to feel the sound in New York, we are on the avenues of New York, the intersections, the air)
Mario hears the sound:
"He stood up and listened with rapt attention. The rumbling of the shuttles faded away and could no longer be heard, leaving only the vaguely audible sound of the sparse cars of the night people coming from the street. The station was empty, but there was a silent clamor in the air. Mario still listened attentively, endeavoring to catch this mysterious sound, which came to mind again-" (and our ears, too, briefly after the cacophony of wrong sounds had obscured the scene, seemed to hear also a singular sound, to which the storyteller was yet as sensitive as those of the musician, the (A subtle sound, everything flowing from the heart, as if it were divine, clear to the ear)
It was the rendered sound of the cricket Chester appearing --
Like the sound of a violin's strings bursting forth from a sharp stroke of the bowstring, or like the sudden plucking of a harp. It was as if somewhere in a verdant forest, far from New York, a leaf had fluttered down through the dreary blackness at midnight and fallen into the underbrush - the sound was the echo of the falling leaf. (Children and artists have a greater sense of wonder at sound.)
Mario could not help trembling all over with delight as the cricket ate from his hand.
Chester - the name of the cricket, which we also feel when the writer pays homage to Tchaikovsky and Liszt, has a wonderful voice of high frequency, and every word that comes out of his mouth seems like transcendental music, I feel like the singer-poet of American country music.
Tucker won Chester's friendship with a piece of leftover sausage.
Henry, a stray cat in a subway station, is gentle and unusually kind to Tucker, who also likes the sounds Chester makes. Henry and Tucker are country bumpkin Chester's guided tours of New York, and in Chester's eyes, Times Square, New York emerges as a dizzying, almost-stopping-for-breath way of seeing the big city in all its glory.
"They're standing on a corner of the Times Building at the south end of Times Square, and above this cricket's head, a block of skyscrapers seems like a glowing mountain that towers straight into the night sky. The neon lights are still shining brightly, even though it's so late in the evening. All kinds of red, yellow, blue, and green lights reflected on it, and the air was filled with the noise of people and cars coming and going. The scene was as if Times Square were a large seashell, and the various colors and sounds were like waves, surging into the shell in waves. A palpitation made Chester not only close his eyes. For a cricket who, until now, had always relied on willows to measure the height of things and babbling brooks to evaluate the sounds around it, the scene was a little too frightening and a little too gaudy"
This suddenly gave Chester a wistful thought:
"Chester's eyes gradually adjusted to the lights. It lifted its head and looked far, far above, and in the night sky, high above New York and above the whole world, it recognized a star it used to see in Connecticut. When they had gone down to the station again, Chester lay down again in the matchbox, and it could not help thinking of that star in its mind-throw. The thought that after all these new and strange encounters, there was something so familiar to him, still hanging there, winking at him, suddenly made him feel much better"
(Chester was homesick, and so are you reading this)
Mr. Smedley, the only buyer of American Music from a newsstand, was a music professor, and he said to Mario,
"It has had the best training it could have had from the greatest teacher of all, Nature. Nature has given it a pair of wings that can be pulled against each other, and the instinct to make such wonderful musical sounds. I can add no more talent to this little black Orpheus"
"Orpheus was one of the greatest musicians who ever lived", replied the music teacher, "long, long ago, he was a harp-playing Long ago, he was a harpist who played the harp so beautifully that not only did humans enjoy it, but even rocks, trees, and waterfalls would stop still to listen to him. The lions stopped chasing the deer, the rivers stopped flowing, and the winds held their breath. The whole world fell silent."
Chinatown's Feng Sai is a curio store owner, very much the kind of gentle and thick Confucian elegance of the old Chinese gentleman, he and Mario said the story of the Chinese cricket, the cricket is a man changed into the original, there is a just scholarly character of the people, he was called Xishuai, "he only told the truth, there is no secret in the world that he does not know. He understood the thoughts of animals and people, the wishes of flowers and trees, and the fate of the sun and the stars. The whole world was like an open book to him, which he could read to his heart's content. Even the Jade Emperor, who lives in the sky, loved him for the truths he told".
After death, he was transformed into a cricket, just as Du Yu was transformed into a cuckoo crying and wailing, and a beautiful cricket song is the song sung by this man who still speaks the truth and knows everything. "It sounds like the bells that came faintly from a temple far away on the Yangzi River," says Feng Sai. (How strong is the mood of Chinese art.)
Following the plot of the story, the fun and drama of the story is tightly attached to the downward reading, your heart and the cricket, at this point, should be compatible.
Chester's moving music, countless people flocked to
"It was the end of summer, the favorite season of the year for crickets around the world. This summer, Chester is in New York, and of course it doesn't chirp as often as it has in years past, but tonight it's playing its heart out. He thought of the meadow and the stake and the brook and the old willow tree in his hometown. So the music just overflowed from under its wings like running water and filled the whole newsstand."
(You can have the feeling of an unplugged little theater concert, that sound of real emotion)
"Without realizing it, this cricket just chirped, and it couldn't help but want to let out the sadness that was filling its heart, and it knew that if it could just chant the sadness out, it would feel better. So it did, singing the first few notes of an Italian ballad it had heard last night. It wasn't that it had intentionally chosen the song, it was just sad and sweet, and it fit right in with its current mood. 'Rejoin the Suliento'."
For some reason, just thinking about September, and the way the earth changes when the seasons change, Chester can't help but feel downcast and disillusioned.
As he was playing in the evening, a yellow leaf, the first of fall, blew into the station and landed right next to the cricket cage. The leaf had blown all the way from New Jersey, and a naughty fall wind had fluttered it across the Hudson River, up Forty-second Street, and swept it down to the subway entrance. Chester was halfway through a song when this leaf fell. At the sight of this little reminder of the chronological change that was going on out in the countryside, its mind snapped, and it could scarcely go on with the act of walking. But then it remembered where it was and forced itself to keep going. Mario was the only one who noticed the momentary interruption in the playing.
"I think I'm just having a bit of a September blues." Chastity spoke with a sigh, "It's almost fall, at just about the most beautiful time of year in Connecticut. All the trees are changing colors and every day is clear and sunny. Only the occasional wisp of smoke from burning leaves appears in the sky. This is also when the pumpkins are about to be harvested." "I longed to see the bundles of corn that were harvested."
"I love New York and the fact that so many people come to hear me play, and I love Connecticut even more. I want to go home."
With Tower River and Henry watching, Chester boarded a train headed back to Connecticut --