wrestle with it, wrestle honestly
2022 is coming to an end. Looking back on this year, it seems that nothing good has happened for a long time. The neighborhood is at a standstill, and restaurants, bookstores, shopping malls, and express delivery in many cities continue to shut down; it is cold outside the window, and the feeling of cold winter touches everyone from all walks of life. But in corners of the world, tiny improvements are still being made. Films by young directors were successfully screened against all odds, the World Cup ushered in its first female referee yesterday, and the works of mainland directors and actors were awarded overseas. When “regular life” has disappeared, we should cherish the rare “bright moments” and protect our memories, imaginations and hopes.
Today, we try to find more “bright moments” in “normal life” in the book, and find the precious imprints of the lives that once lived with us. In the unconventional time and space, in the daily endurance, review those moments when the snow melts together.
01
“A to X: A Tender Letter to a Lover in Prison”
strength in the age of suffering
A To X, letter from A’ida to Xavier – prison lover sentenced to two life sentences.
The dissident is in a prison cell. Fortunately, a lover restores the meticulous and meticulous daily life for him through letters: snails, radishes, apple trees, men queuing at the bakery, crowded windowsills, clotheslines, TV satellite dishes, A few chairs by the chimney, two birdcages, a dozen small illegally built balconies with a large pile of potted plants and cat feed trays on them, and the turbulent war that the town cannot escape.
The intimate nicknames among lovers, the tireless description of trivial matters, and the determination to count the roses with one hundred and thirty thorns are the most gentle power in the suffering age.
bright moment
my flame:
You can tell by just looking that the bread is too hot to handle. At six o’clock in the evening there was a queue of twenty men at the bakery down from the pharmacy. They always put me first in line if I’m wearing a pharmacy white gown. They will wait patiently for a quarter of an hour, watching the bread come out of the oven. In my opinion, we will never have time to wait like this. The baker didn’t even look at the men, he only had eyes for the bread and the embers behind the white-hot kiln. The men who waited were also very focused, as if they were watching some kind of game. I also want to tell you another thing.
There is a difference between hope and expectation. At first, I thought it was a question of how long it would last, hoping that what was waiting was a little further away than expected. But I was wrong. Expectations are of the body, but hopes are of the soul. This is where the difference lies. Anticipation and hope talk to each other, stimulate or comfort each other, but each has its own dream. One more thing I learned, body expectations can last as long as any hope, like my body expects your body.
Since they gave you two life sentences, I don’t trust their time anymore.
Love
Also, have you received the radishes delivered by courier?
02
“plague”
choose to fight honestly
A city’s nightmare begins when a doctor walks out of his practice “stumbling over a dead rat on the landing”.
Re-reading this book seems to confirm the preface quote: use a different kind of prison life to reproduce a certain prison life.
“One hundred million corpses are scattered in the long history, just a puff of smoke in the imagination”, and the people you see being hit by death suffer for no reason, like the characters in the book, drinking to escape One way, choosing faith is another (you have to pray that faith is strong enough), and the hardest thing is to fight it, fight it honestly, and remember this fight.
After all, all one can win in the plague is cognition and memory.
bright moment
The first official displays of jubilation rose from the dark harbor. The people in the whole city competed to watch, and the cheers lasted for a long time. Cottard, Tarrou, and Rieux all the men and wives he had lost, dead or criminal, were now forgotten. The old man was right, people are always the same. But what remained constant was their energy and their innocence, and it was here that Rieux, transcending all pain, felt connected to them. At this time, the louder and longer lasting cheers reverberated in the city and spread to the foot of the platform, and the fire trees and silver flowers in the sky were radiant and ever-changing… I will tell you what can be learned in a disaster, and the people’s heart There are always more things to be admired in this book than to be cast aside.
…
As he listened to the cheers from the town, Rieux also reflected on the past. He decided that this universal joy was always threatened, because he knew what the joyful crowd knew nothing: according to medical books. According to the records, Yersinia pestis will never die or disappear. They can survive for decades in furniture and clothing; they wait patiently in rooms, cellars, suitcases, handkerchiefs and waste paper. Maybe one day, the plague will wake up its rats again, let them die in a happy city, make people suffer from disasters again, and learn their lessons again.
03
“The Painted Bird”
No one is prepared for the sudden brutality that surrounds them
A “Gypsy” mute doomed to be burned to death, a native-born alien turned alien, buried in the ground with only his head sticking out, which was pecked scarred by crows.
After losing contact with his family during World War II, a young boy with black hair and black eyes was deemed ominous in Eastern Europe, with villagers “ignorant and rough, though not meant to be”.
Compared with critics who accused the book of “exaggerating atrocities” and “being too deeply rooted in cruelty”, Eastern European war witnesses accused it of “diluting historical truth” and “describing pastoral stories”.
No one is mentally prepared for the sudden outburst of brutality around them. All we can do is to find our lost voice at a certain moment when the sun fills the room after wading through all the absurdities.
bright moment
The April sun filled the room. I moved my head and it didn’t seem to be hurt. I propped myself up on my hands, and just as I was about to lie down, the phone rang. The nurse had left, but the phone kept ringing and ringing.
I struggled to get out of bed and walked to the table. I picked up the receiver and heard a man’s voice.
I held the receiver to my ear and listened to his impatient words; there was someone somewhere on the other end of the phone line who wanted to talk to me… I felt an overwhelming urge to speak. Blood rushed to my head, and my eyeballs bulged for a moment, as if they were about to jump out of their sockets and onto the floor.
I opened my mouth and pronounced it vigorously. A series of sounds flew slowly out of my throat, and I began to combine these sounds into syllables and words with nervous concentration.
I distinctly heard syllables and words popping out of my throat one by one, like peas popping out of a split pod. I put the mic aside, almost in disbelief that this was possible. I started reciting words, sentences, and snippets of Mitka’s lyrics to myself. The voice I had lost in a distant country church found me and filled the room. I talked loudly and incessantly, first like a farmer, then like a city man, speaking faster and faster as best I could, exulting in the voices—voices that were heavy with meaning, like belts. The snow of the water is heavy with the presence of the water—and so I proved to myself again and again and again and again that I could speak again, that my voice did not want to leave me through the doorway that opened to the balcony.
04
“Doctor Zhivago”
He sensed the snow melting
“I think that if the bestiality latent in man can be stopped by threats, whether prison or retribution, then the highest symbol of humanity is not the self-sacrificing preacher but the circus tamer.” This is what Doctor Zhivago’s uncle believed.
In the midst of turmoil, Doctor Zhivago realized that the excessive violence of World War I and the October Revolution caused accidental injuries to innocent civilians. He despaired of such beautiful slogans as “remaking life”: “Life has never been a mass of material things. Life itself, so to speak, is constantly renewing itself, correcting itself, forever reinventing itself. A hundred times better.”
The whole book is filled with poetic mist, and the wilderness, snow layer, and spruce all reflect the mood. In the endurance of everyday life, Dr. Zhivago noticed the snow melt.
bright moment
At first, the snow melted from the inside, quietly and unnoticed. When half of this uncanny workmanship is completed, it will no longer be possible to cover it up. The miracle began to be revealed, and there was already a gurgling water from under the loose snow layer. The deserted jungle is full of energy, and everything there is awakened. The world where the flowing water wanders is vast. It flew down from the cliff, formed a pool of clear pools, and then overflowed in all directions. Soon, its dull sound sounded in the dense forest, and dense mist rose. A stream of water meanders forward in the forest like a snake. When it encounters obstructed snow, it goes under and flows smoothly on the flat ground. Once it falls down, it will be accompanied by a wave of The dust of the water, the land can no longer hold any more water, so those hundreds of years of spruces that soar into the sky suck it in with their roots, leaving groups of dry shallow water around the roots. Brown foam, like the residue left on the lips of people who drink beer. The sky was also stained with the drunkenness of spring, and it was covered with dark clouds in the sleepy state. Black, felt clouds hung low over the forest, and from their lower legs dropped warm, earthy showers that washed away the last shattered black ice from the ground.
05
“The Snow Is Coming”
Face to face with death several times
Death is like snow, falling quickly, and I have encountered it more than once.
Comrades, close friends, and lovers, they either returned to the snow, or were blocked by wind and snow on the way to survive, or encountered an avalanche, and the happiness they had finally pursued was instantly shattered. Eiger’s life has been covered by heavy snow several times, making it almost breathless, but in a light way, just 80,000 words “encapsulates a world of change, loss and restoration”.
Bad luck was caught off guard, and Eiger’s life was not silently obedient. He cherished a trace of pain and a short smile in front of the stove, and lived slowly and calmly.
bright moment
When he opened his eyes again, he saw a young woman standing in front of him with her hands on her hips, looking at him. She had short, flaxen-blond hair, and her skin glowed rosy in the heat of the fire. Iger couldn’t help but think of the newborn piglets. When he was a child, he would sometimes take them out of the haystack and put his face on their soft bellies that smelled of mud, milk and pig manure. He looked down at his hands, and suddenly they looked strange: clumsy, useless, and dull.
“Another glass?” the young woman asked. Iger nodded, and she brought a new cup. A pleat of her shirt touched Iger’s upper arm lightly as she bent forward to set the glass down on the table. That slight touch was almost imperceptible, but it still left a sweet pain in Eiger’s heart, and this painful feeling seemed to sink deeper into his body every second. He looked at her, and she smiled.
For the rest of his life Andreas Eiger would often recall this moment, that brief smile that afternoon – in front of the softly crackling stove in the inn.
06
“If Not Now, When? “
Reclaiming dignity and freedom in a struggle of disparity in power
174517, this is Levi’s number in Auschwitz concentration camp, he frankly wears short sleeves in winter, so that the string of numbers on his arm can be revealed after taking off his coat. And, it appears on Levi’s tombstone.
As an “Auschwitz survivor,” off the record, Primo Levi created this work of fiction. In the last years of World War II, a Jewish guerrilla escaped the massacre, took up arms, crossed Poland and Germany, arrived in Italy, and struggled against the storm of the times. Levi mercifully let the story end with the birth of the newborn, and almost at the same time, a mushroom cloud rose over Hiroshima.
He stated that this creation was in response to a controversy about the behavior of Jews during the Holocaust: “A tribute to those Jews, whether few or many, who have rediscovered their dignity and freedom in this struggle of disparity in power. .”
bright moment
They could hear the city waking up, the screeching of trams, the opening of shop shutters. A nurse came out of the delivery room, followed by a doctor, and later returned to the delivery room. Isidor stopped being arrogant and turned to pleading. Although he couldn’t understand the language, the doctor made a gesture of reassurance and pointed to his watch: within two hours, one hour. They heard constant shouting, a roar of engines, and then silence. Finally, when the sun was shining brightly, a nurse came out with a smile on her face, holding a package, and said with a smile, “Boy, it’s a boy.” No one understood. She looked around and saw that the hairy Yizu was just right, so she tugged at his beard: “Male—just like him!”
They all stood up. Mendel and Lyn hug Isidore. Isidor’s eyes, red from sleepless nights, glowed now. The doctor also came out, patted Isidor on the shoulder, and walked towards the end of the corridor, but a colleague stopped him from discussing with an open newspaper in his hand. They were surrounded by other doctors, nuns, and nurses. Mendel moved closer too, and managed to see the newspaper, a single page with huge headlines that he couldn’t read. The issue date of that newspaper was August 7, 1945, and it reported the news of the first atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.
Before being chosen by suffering, the Jewish parchment “Talmud” has already said:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
EDIT: Killer
Producer: Li Ergou
What bright moments are you saving for yourself?
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