Author Liu Yu, Master of the National People's Congress, Ph.D. at Columbia University, postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, former Cambridge teacher, and now professor at the Department of Political Science in Tsinghua University.
Anyone will be shocked to see such a heavyweight background. But what attracts me more is not these external names, but those words that run counter to her academic elite status: non-mainstream, anti-chicken soup, profound, sharp and transparent, free-flowing imagination and sense of humor, full of modernity and fashion, but also a little hippie, niche, decadent, literary and artistic fan and nonsense, frequent golden sentences, refreshing and spicy.
The world is so utilitarian and impetuous, with fewer interesting people, fewer profound ones and fewer interesting and profound ones. Through these powerful and warm words, I read an interesting and profound, frank and intelligent Liu Yu.
I knew this name and this book many years ago, probably when 20 10 was first published. The title and title made me mistake it for a male writer's book. My first instinct is that this is just an ordinary collection of essays. This book is vast and fleeting, and it doesn't attract me to read it.
The encounter between one person and another person is fate. The encounter between a person and a book is also fate. If you don't meet, it is fate. Even if we meet, we may not understand. When fate comes, we will meet.
Then why did I open it again after all these years? I have to start with Zhou Lian, who is Liu Yu's husband. A while ago, I was listening to a lecture on western philosophy given by Zhou Lian, a professor in the Philosophy Department of the Himalayan People's Congress. From enjoying last week's lecture to becoming interested in Liu Yu, I didn't know that they were actually a couple.
Socrates said: An unexamined life is not worth living. This book can be said to be a profound practice of this sentence. Liu Yu looks at everything: crazy old men in the street, roommates, love, movies and books, from system to mouse, with a total of 10 1, which is divided into five themes: on others as hell, on oneself as others, on the unknowable meaning of life, on the impossibility of love and on the unknowable and impossible of society. The title "Give You a Bullet" is the title of one of them.
He is good at using serious political discourse to compare ordinary trivial life, and the collision between Zhuang and Harmony produces a strange sense of humor. It is accurate and unique to use all kinds of wonderful metaphors with wide brain holes; There are both sensibility revealed in small emotions and rationality conveyed in rigorous logic.
This book records Liu Yu's life from 2005 to 2009, especially her life at Harvard from 2006 to 2007. It covers a wide range, contains a lot of information and has profound thoughts. Many allusions and metaphors need extensive common sense, certain life experience and political knowledge background. If I went to study in 1989, I might not understand many wonderful places because of my own cognitive and experience limitations. Even if I did, I just skimmed the water and passed. Even now, some articles still feel a little confused.
But most of them still make me laugh, smile, think or have endless aftertaste. In short, I can't put it down. In particular, the following 20 articles, after reading it, are sad.
When I feel "addicted" to a book, I usually don't forget it when I am too happy, but I will study it carefully-why does this book make me feel "confidant" and what do they mean to me? Looking at life begins with looking at yourself, doesn't it?
Everyone is a treasure. Whenever I do this, I always find more myself by surprise or accident, so I am more addicted. This process of excavating treasures is called "self-awareness", which is everyone's most basic mission and obligation. If you don't know yourself, what can you talk about?
"A thousand people have a thousand Hamlets", which is my understanding: a thousand people see a thousand different selves in the same book. This is how reading affects a person. Romain rolland said: "No one has ever read for the sake of reading. He only reads himself in the book, only finds himself in the book and checks himself."
Like most people, we only cling to the sixpence in front of us, which is why we are particularly in awe of Charles. He looked up and saw the moon with sixpence everywhere.
This article shows my attitude towards dreams: I have never been as brave or pure as Charles-he didn't actually "choose a dream, but was hit by it and captured by it". For me, the dream is always behind the reality, but it is essential. I won't just be satisfied with the sixpence in hand. Only by grasping the sixpence in hand can I dare to look up at the brightness of the moon.
Liu Yu wrote about how to deal with the sanitary problems of public kitchens when she was studying abroad and shared them with students from all over the world. She regards the solution and treatment of this problem as a reflection and experiment on another problem: "Is it possible to have a rational, harmonious and just public order? If possible, what are its conditions? If not, what are its obstacles? The former is a matter of life and the latter is a political issue. "
Like this article, I found that I always wanted to have this ability: to extract a profound insight into a highly problematic problem in ordinary and trivial life, even if the two seem far apart.
Liu Yu regards the mysterious and profound academic work of scholars as just a "production line" in the eyes of outsiders. In fact, don't most of us do the same in our work and life? How many people have the courage and ability to truly pursue spiritual freedom? Just like those who have been institutionalized for too long in The Shawshank Redemption, we can't adapt to life outside the prison, occasionally thinking about "flying over the assembly line", but we are afraid of the abyss outside the assembly line.
My thinking is: since "the rice bowl has no obligation to cultivate sentiment and purify the soul", we need to cultivate hobbies that can cultivate sentiment and purify the soul outside the assembly line, so that we can have more opportunities to face and please our flexibility and resist the institutionalization of the assembly line.
To paraphrase Marx, "production" is divided into "simple reproduction" and "expanded reproduction", and Liu Yu divides things in life into "simple reproduction" (things you have to do to make a living) and "expanded reproduction" (things you really like and yearn for). This also sums up two things in my life very accurately.
Liu Yu's attitude towards two kinds of affairs is also my heart. "What we have to do is like an ugly and bad old man with an arranged marriage, blocking a girl's desire to elope." This sentence has somewhat alleviated my self-blame, and it turns out that I am not the only one. Every time I am reluctant to be entangled in trivial matters, I always miss those sweet lovers-reading, writing, movies, music, lectures, wandering around alone in a daze ... I can't wait to see them right away.
Look, Liu Yu is always good at living by political analogy, and there are always many such metaphors that are both unexpected and interesting.
"Everyone has a long list in his heart, and how many beautiful things are written in these lists, but they are always delayed, shelved and rotted in the attic of time."
Have you ever had a time when you obviously have a lot of beautiful things to do, but you repeatedly told yourself, "Wait until I finish what I'm doing?" Then you will be busy all your life, or you will lose your enthusiasm when you finish. As a result, you missed a lot of beautiful things, and we drifted away from the beautiful life in our dreams.
I have a very strong feeling of "life is put on hold" for two periods. One is to prepare for the defense of on-the-job master's thesis, and the other is to prepare for an important exam. I was very unhappy during that time, so I have to bite the bullet. The symptoms are similar to lovesickness, because the sweet lovers I mentioned above are all locked in a dark room and can't think of them all day.
Later, I chose never to put it on hold or postpone it. Since life is short and full of "ifs", you never know which comes first, tomorrow or accident, so why not let yourself do what you want at every moment?
It is said that "Paris" is a metaphor, which refers to a person's courage to pursue his dreams, but I don't think so. When watching this movie, I have a vague feeling that "Paris" refers to the yearning for "living elsewhere": if you emigrate, if you move to another city, if you change your job, if you change your big house, if you change people, even if you have an afterlife. ...
But the problem is, if these things really happen, your life may not be better, because the problem is yourself. The only constant in all the above changes is yourself.
When I realized this, I did this: if you really want to live elsewhere, then act for your goal, at any cost; Otherwise, stay where you are and cherish every moment. It's useless to fantasize and complain, just like the heroine in the play who lost her life in anger and despair.
This article suddenly made me understand: it turned out that my inexplicable heartache or ecstasy was not love at all, but a secret love. A more accurate translation is "I liked Ta briefly, enthusiastically, but shyly." .
I learned this word from my friend for the first time. The charm of unrequited love comes from fantasy, and a mature adult cannot fall into fantasy for a long time. As a result, the illusion disappears and the press oil runs out.
The reminder is: here comes the girl. First of all, you should have the wisdom to distinguish, and secondly, you should have the wisdom to judge whether you should act, because "turning around in front of some possibilities is a beautiful mistake;" But going forward is a stupid mistake. "
Liu Yu feels that there is a "sense of the end of history" in the United States, but it is more likely to return to China. My short life experience in America made me feel the same way. This is also the fundamental reason why I have always been "firm" in today's surging "immigration tide". For me, it means food and more possibilities for self-realization.
The cool and popular phrase "One person should be like a team" comes from this article. Its whole sentence is "a person should be like a team, recruiting for his own mind and heart, not discouraged, calling for and loving freedom."
I'm actually talking about the relationship between a person and himself: everything outside is available but not available, and only you can ask for it.
This article is funny. The Formal Hall, a traditional activity in Cambridge and Oxford, is a formal dinner for the upper class, but it was ridiculed and even satirized by Liu Yu. This disintegration of authority, status, seriousness and high-end is a kind of tearing off the coat of vanity and laughing at my true love for the outside world, which is one of the main reasons why I like Liu Yu's words.
Swallow the Red Pill satirizes the "pretending to be profound" in the film The Matrix. There are also these articles, which subtly touched my heart in an instant: dating culture, the best time, love hunger, the evolution trend of marriage system, beyond that day, the end of politics, the life after the disappearance of human beings and where the school cows are. If you accidentally write too much, don't write, go and see for yourself.
As for the endless golden sentences in the book, I copied a few words for you, as shown above (the words are not good-looking, please ignore them automatically), and the italics in the quotation marks above are also taken from the original sentences in the book. Yes, isn't it cool and enjoyable? Of course, if you read a sentence or a paragraph in isolation from the context, it is inevitable that you will not understand its meaning or take it out of context, so read the whole book.
In the postscript of this book, Liu Yu said that she "has a dull personality and a thin life, and words are her way of experiencing life", so she chose to "make up for the lack of events with feelings". "I believe that it is the richness of a person's feelings, not the density of events in his life, that determines the texture of his life; It is a person's eyes that determine the color of a person's life, not the scenery in front of him. "
Look at yourself, I am not wrong. Life is ordinary and thin. I experience life through words and capture every subtle feeling. So, after reading these articles, thank you for your patience in listening to my nagging.
P.S. is reading another book of hers, The Water Level of Thought. Liu Yu herself said that she usually writes two kinds of words: life essays and political comments. Send You a Bullet is the former, and The Water Level of Thought is the latter. The style of writing is similar, the latter is slightly cold and hard, and the topics discussed are different. They are all beautiful.