Preface
The Smoke Cloud on the Fan (Preface)
If there is no mirror in a young girl's dressing table,
and she gazes all day at the fan hanging on the wall,
The pavilions on the fan are like the reflection in the water,
and they are stained with the leftover powder and tears like the clouds of smoke ...
"Do you think our hearing and vision are very poorly limited? ...
"You say our hearing and sight are pitifully limited?"
"Yes. One summer I was walking on a farm with a man who suffered from color blindness and shook a red flower to him in passing and he said it was blue."
"Then you grieved for him"
"I grieved for myself."
"Then you believe in something mysterious."
"I like to imagine something far away. Some characters that don't exist. And many lands whose names cannot be found on human maps. I can't say how many days and nights I've walked into the paintings on my walls out of my mind attempting to walk into them, as the stories say. But my walls were white. But the golden door, the door that I do not know whether it is paradise or hell, did open for me."
"Then you are moved by life"
"I am moved by life only in its manifestations. Alas, it is a long, long time since I rode the rafter to the sea, and a stormy wave sent me to this desert island, and I have not climbed into conversation with anyone. And yet today I have a little interest in talking."
"Then speak."
"I'll say, I'll say that I like a half-dozen words of the ancients these days. It is as a floating cloud to me. I like it as a good footnote to one of my essays: I don't know when everything in the world has bored me. I had just listened to the soliloquy of a Danish prince, one truly mad, the other feigning madness, and the universe, so cold in ancient times, seemed so lively that a drop of it made me so drunk that I could not help speaking it. But it is the pure expression of the simile that I now commend, independently of its meaning. Sometimes I really lament the difficulty of drawing analogies. With this I cannot long forget a Hungarian author, who in one of his essays got two beautiful similes: in the twilight, under the window of a hotel, he said that many a toiling man hung his head low like some ship with folded sails and broken masts moored in a silent harbor; and later, describing a young girl, he said, just softly, that her eyes shone like golden keys."
"Is it that they can open the gates of Paradise or Hell?"
"And I once hung my head low by the window of the car, and in the twilight, after casually turning over a volume of melancholy biographies, I lifted my head, and gazed up at the white smoke of the sky, and pondered again on the man who had written a story called 'Smoke' of the life of the man who wrote it. Twilight and Twilight. Where am I going? What awaits me at the end of the journey I had an answer for in the faces of the various passengers in the compartment: those wrinkled faces of boredom and unhappiness, which anyone who looked at them for a moment longer would have wept or gone mad. But, yonder, there was a side profile of a beautiful maiden. The twilight had made a soft backdrop. So I said to myself, "How lonely the world would be without beautiful maidens. For from them we sometimes catch a glimpse of the face of Eve before she was cursed. And so I looked at the clouds in the sky and, as the mysterious eighteenth-century songwriter who claimed to have seen angels and elves said, caught eternity in a flash."
"Where thou wentest then thou cameest again with these words haphazardly, and I could not trace the path of thy thoughts at all."
"So I cherished my dreams. And would like to trace them in fine detail."
"What were some of the dreams"
"First I wanted to trace them on a round window. I have often passed beneath it in the early mornings and good nights, and though I have not glimpsed a figure I have heard white flower-like sighs falling from it. But in the midst of my hesitation the window disappeared. I couldn't find it anymore. Later on, a colorful brush in a dream probably wrote out a line for me to read: "It is clear that Wenjun dreamed all night long, but only the green fan knows it". I woke up sad, as if there was really a story, I like to wander in the desolate place from now on. One summer, when the soft night moved in the street I walked into a cemetery. When I looked up, it turned out to be a bright moonlit night, a realm most often found in the books of Qi Harmony)Zhi Wei (志怪). I sat on the white stone. My shadow was like a black cat,, I couldn't help but reach out and touch it, alas, I thought it was a circle of belts left behind by a female ghost who chanted bitterly, who knew that I had picked it up but it was a fan. So I took it back; treasured it, and when I had the pleasure of working I took it out and traced my dreams on that."
"Now where is the fan"
"When I grew weary of my native land and came to roam these seas, how could I remember to take it with me"
"Then it must be left behind in the land from which you came. the land from which you came."
"Not necessarily."
"Then I will do my best to drift to many continents to find it."
"I'm just afraid the shadow on that fan will be very hazy by the time you find it."
Nineteen thirty-six, February, 22, midnight. Editor's Recommendation He Qifang, one of the Three Poets of the Han Garden, was not only known for his modern poetry, but also for his beautiful prose collection, The Book of Painted Dreams. His prose seems to be confusing, but in fact, it is novel and chic, and he often completes the construction of a beautiful text with joyful words in the midst of fluttering ghostly thoughts. The Record of Painted Dreams is a concentrated representation of his literary style. Table of Contents
Smoke and Clouds on the Fan (Preface)
Tomb
Qiuhaitang
Before the Rain
Twilight
......
The courtyard was quiet. It was as if I could hear how the night slid down from the cobwebbed eaves and landed on the long, slender, ribbonlike orchid leaves among the flowers and masonry, trembling slightly like the wings of a dragonfly that had just settled down, and then finally came to a standstill. The night has become a lake of quiet soft waves, resting in the courtyard, the surface of the waves floating in the green color of the ghostly glory.
The lonely woman was leaning against the stone wall in front of the steps.
The color of the night, the sea like water mist, the incense burner dense smoke like color, seems to have not yet stained the field of her contemplation, she is still hanging hands and head down, did not move. But a silvery sound escaped from the corner of the steps, sharp, broken and rounded, with a little dampness, as if squeezed out of a stone-built cave, and rolled like a pearl on the green moss saturated with water; and disappeared like a dew. There was no going on, no continuing. O lonely cricket of early fall.
She raised her head.
The yellow of the chrysanthemums that had just aroused her feeling of desolation had faded, and in the fishbowl, although the ponderous black shadow of the rocky outcrop still stood, it was no longer possible to distinguish its delicate peaks and the verdant pueraria above. This early autumn night like a lotus root-colored cicada-like veil, floating up a faint sadness.
She inclined her head even more to look up.
Jingtai blue sky to the towering sycamore sketched out the reunion of the large leaves, the crescent moon as a golden boat moored between the sparse branches. Grain star, suspected to be white small flowers from the angel's fingers spilled out, and attempted to jewel-like solidified embedded in the sky. But still flickering, emitting a crystalline light, and, from the ice-like sky, their fragrance soundless shrapnel like snow drifting down.
The Milky Way is diagonally across. The love in the sky is also isolated? The black-feathered magpies are blessed, and year after year, they build a bridge of meeting to the lovesick cows and daughters.
What about her nostalgia, like a lost bird drifting in this sea of sighing night, or a memory, or a hope like red silk tangled between the toes, the light wings grow heavy with fatigue, looking at a hairless green island: can one not be weary of this distant and hopeless journey
Her head hangs down feebly again.
As if for support, her white hand touched the stone balustrade. A wisp of cold like a slender brown snake from her fingertips straight into the depths of the heart, slowly twisting and turning curled into a ring, pointed thin tail as a result of warm rest and warped trembling. Steps, a wutong leaves quietly fall, her shoulders with a slight shrug, the corner of her coat brushed against the appendage of the stone prongs of the cold sound, doubt is her soul so noiselessly fell into the darkness to go.
Her hand dreamily stroked her temples again. Then, the discovery in the heart of the sour hot rise, large tears from the eyes slipped to the tip of the beautiful eyelashes, congealed into exquisite grain, round light, such as the white dew on the grass, no breeze shake on the quiet, can not be regained fell down ......
Just in the green moss covered, do not see the masonry marks of the steps, the begonias thrive out. The two petals round bulging like roses cheeks between the wine whirlpool, two long petals stretching like envious insects fly swimming wings, the leaf surface is green, the back of the leaf is red, attached to the fuzzy light hairs, vermilion-colored stems slanting from the stone appendages under the base of the Prime, such as Prime out of an ancient sweet story.
Added:
The sound of autumn
The more we live in the city, the less we understand the seasons.
We can't smell the message of spring as we did in the countryside in our childhood, when we saw wildflowers blooming all over the place; we can't feel the joy of summer nights in the courtyard at night
watching old people waving their fans and enjoying the coolness; and we can't know that autumn is coming to an end by doing the last
sailing fishing trip to the sea before the northeast monsoon.
The city is like this: on summer nights we sit in air-conditioned houses and look away from the stars outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, and wonder for a few moments if it's fall;
in the winter cold, we walk through the gathered flower markets and think spring is in full swing. Then we were slowly confused and lost,
Seasons had lost their meaning to us, for there are no seasons in the work of the city.
The other day, a friend visited and told me with gusto, "Fall is here, did you know?"
His sudden
question took me by surprise, and when I inquired later, I realized that his message of autumn came from the market. He went to the market to buy food, and
saw that all the crabs in the market were yellow, and only then was he surprised to find that autumn had arrived, which did not stop me from laughing; for the ducks, who are the first to know about the warmth of the water in the spring river
know that they are the first to know about it. If you know that people know the fall from the market, I'm afraid you have to laugh.
How did the ancients know about fall?
I remember the Song Dynasty lyricist Jiang Jie wrote a song titled "Autumn Sounds":
Yellow flowers in deep alleys,
Red flowers in low windows,
Desolate sounds of autumn,
Beans and rain,
In the middle of the sound of the wind.
Sparse twenty-five points,
Li Qiaoqiao door is not locked more sound.
The old man is far away,
asking who shook the jade pendant,
the bell at the bottom of the eaves.
The colorful horns fall with the moon,
and the camping horses are moving,
and the sound of cigars is rising.
The neighboring lamps are flickering,
and there is still the sound of anvils in front of the lamps.
It's the first time I've heard him talk about his sorrows,
and how many eggs he's broken!
It's not over yet,
I'll share half of it with the geese.
This song is very short, but it uses ten words of "sound", which is rare among the lyricists of Song Dynasty; Jiang Jie used the sound of wind
, the sound of rain, the sound of night shift, the sound of bell, the sound of reed, the sound of anvil, the sound of grasshopper and the sound of geese to describe the arrival of autumn, which makes people feel
a rhythmic autumn. Chinese literature in the past had a very strong sense of the seasons, but unfortunately, this sense of the seasons is slowly being lost. Some people say that our sense of seasons is lost because Taiwan is a place with four seasons,
which I disagree with; even in the hottest south, farmers who work with their hands will always have
a sensitivity to changes in time and climate, a sensitivity that is like being able to predict when a flower bud will open when you see it.
In an age of rapid industrial development, we are constantly making new discoveries in our lives. Our ancestors only knew the real
body, the change of seasons, the growth of flowers, plants and trees, and later people gradually penetrate the entity of things to find the finer
matter, the old generation only knew the smallest unit of matter is a molecule, and later knew that under the molecule there are atoms, and now we know that there are nuclei within the atom, there are in the neutron, and there are particles, and we may find even finer particles within the neutron particle in the future. Now we know that within the atom there is a nucleus, a neutron, and a particle. Sadly
, we have lost the visible entity of things, which is exactly what the old Chinese saying "only see the autumn hairs, not see the opinion
salary" is all about.
Today, our sense of nature is even less than that of a tree. A tree knows when to bud, blossom,
bear fruit, drop leaves, and so on, and records its life experience in a loose or tight circle of the wheel of the year, but what about us? There are many
many young children who don't even know when a rose or an azalea blooms. Let alone experience the onset of fall in sound
.
Since we have been able to control the temperature inside our homes, the feeling of the seasons has become an abandoned child, and not many people can hear it, even though it cries out violently in the winter
days. Once I was in New York City, snow was falling outside the window, and because of the strong indoor heating, we were only wearing singlets at a friend's house, and my friend took out ice cream from the freezer to serve us. I was holding the ice cream and looking out the window at the snow, and I was actually frozen with nostalgia for the winter life of a small stove on red clay. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that.
Then
The child of the season explored outside the window, as if I saw it tiptoeing, walking into the distant woods.
Because people change nature indoors, it's not easy to understand how lovely the afternoon sun is in winter, nor is it easy to
realize the pleasure of listening to the crickets on the patio on a summer night and letting the cool phoenix blow. Because of greenhouse cultivation, we have four seasons of rose
rose flowers, but we will not be able to affectionately know the spring rose is how beautiful; we have four seasons of azalea to enjoy, but also do not know
that azalea blood like flowers is how to move the people.
Legend has it that Wu Zetian of the Tang Dynasty ordered the peony to be burnt by fire because the blossom of the peony was too late, which frightened the peony fairy
so much that she hastened to blossom the peony all night long to entertain the Empress Wu, and only then was she spared from the pain of burnt blossom. When I read this legend, I
was still an inexperienced teenager, and I couldn't help but cover the scroll and sigh; those flowers in the greenhouse now, isn't it exactly the fire that is used to
roast all kinds of flowers of the fairy? Making peonies blossom in the winter when it is still snowing heavily outside, what kind of fun
interest can one have in the end? I don't get it.
The budding spring, the green summer, the fading autumn, and the withering winter are also getting lost in the evolution of human science. I
We know the coming of autumn, after all, is no longer from the fallen leaves on the ground, but the crabapple in the market, is the TV, newspaper ads for heating
and felt, so that I have a kind of sad heart clearing in the fall when I look north at the window.
This mood, I'm afraid, is something our next generation of children will never know!
--November 24, 1982
White Butterflies on the Seashore
I went to the seashore with two friends to take photographs and sketches. One of my friends is a photographer and the other a painter, and they were simultaneously moved by the beauty of the deserted villages, ruined ships, and dead branches on the beach, and the white, long sandy beaches were ignored. I saw them take out their cameras and sketchbooks, sitting on the head of the hulk, working with such deep emotion and concentration, I thought, usually we feel beautiful for things with vitality, but why do we still feel beautiful for the things in front of us, whose vitality has long been lost? I am afraid that we feel the time, and the beauty of impermanence and loneliness!
Then, I came to the conclusion that if a person is willing to always keep the heart to look for the beautiful feeling, then in the change of things, no matter whether it is full of life or dead and silent can see the beauty, the root of that beauty is not in the things, but in the heart, feeling, and even the eyes.
While pondering, the photographer exclaimed, "Yikes! Butterflies! A flock of white butterflies." As he screamed, he immediately jumped up and ran towards the coast.
Looking in the direction of his running, there were really seven or eight white shadows chasing on the beach, which also surprised me, where are the butterflies on the beach? There are no plants or flowers, and the wind is so wild. But those white butterflies fluttering up and down were indeed very beautiful, no wonder the photographer ran so fast, if I could take a picture of white butterflies fluttering on the waves, it would not be a waste of this trip.
I saw the photographer standing and gazing at the white butterflies, not raising his camera, and he swooped down to catch one of them, and the images seemed like a movie, silent, slow-motion silhouettes.
Then the photographer walked back in slow motion, the white butterflies on the beach still flying behind him.
"Did you get the shot?" I asked him.
He disheveled and opened his right hand, the butterfly he had just caught. The three of us burst out laughing at the same time, but it turned out that what he had caught was not a white butterfly, but a white piece of paper. The pieces of paper were originally trash on the beach, blown and danced by the sea breeze, and from a distance, it looked like a group of white butterflies flying in the sea.
The truth is often so ruthless.
I said to the photographer: "If you do not run over to see, until now we all thought it was white butterflies!"
Indeed, visually, the trashy piece of paper and the white butterfly are identical and indistinguishable. Our sense of beauty comes not so much from our vision as from our imagination. When we see "white butterflies flying on the sea" and "garbage paper flying on the sea", both the images and the vision are the same, but it is our imagination that makes the difference.
This reminds me that the senses are not real, and we are often deceived by our senses.
In fact, it is not uncommon to see a piece of paper as a white butterfly!
Before marriage, girlfriends are white butterflies, but after marriage, they are just a piece of paper.
The best friends were white butterflies, but when they broke up, they realized that they were pieces of paper.
The unfinished poem, the love affair without ending, the dream that was awakened, the misty manor on the mountain top, and the story of the unfinished relationship are all white butterflies fluttering on the seashore of life, and they don't necessarily need to run fast to see them. As long as the expression, there is an end, no longer flowing thoughts, then immediately stop frame, become a piece of paper.
I returned home and sat in the study looking away from the direction of the North Sea. I think, just this afternoon, I was sitting on the coast of the North Sea blowing the sea breeze, see white butterflies - oh, no! white pieces of paper - fluttering in the wind. Now, all these seemingly real experiences have become phantoms with the wind. Or, it will come flying in some dream, or, in some seaside, in some life, there will be butterflies.
Alas! A real white butterfly is now sucking nectar from a pot of purple jasmine I planted! Do you believe it?
You do! Congratulations, you are a person with a sense of beauty, and you will see white butterflies flying in and out of the sea of life from time to time.
You don't believe me? Also congratulate you, you are practical people, in the sea of life, you will often fast and furious, to find the truth of the paper and butterflies.
Happiness is the best tonic
When you turn on the TV or open the newspaper, you will see many advertisements for tonic almost every day, teaching us how to become stronger, how to become brave, how to be like a living dragon even after 40 years old.
What is puzzling is that next to these advertisements, there are almost as many advertisements teaching us to lose weight, teaching us how to get rid of excess nutrients, how to lose excess fat, how to look like a high school classmate when we are forty.
Undoubtedly, these are confusing times.
Many people go on supplements out of fear of inadequacy.
Many people go on diets because they worry about their excess.
I've often wondered: aren't those who take supplements and those who lose weight the same people? This is exactly how we trouble ourselves and fall into the traps that businessmen create for us.
I know that one of the best ways to take a tonic and lose weight at the same time is to relax, to be happy, to get rid of worries and troubles, to let go of those insufficient and excesses of the mind.
Really, being happy is the best tonic, it will make us look like a living dragon at all times, and our state of mind will always be maintained like that of our high school classmates
.