birthday under lockdown

Today, I have been locked up at home for four weeks, but this day has another special meaning to me: today is my birthday.

I have to admit, just a month ago, I didn't expect to celebrate my birthday in lockdown, and that seemed like a sort of absurd dystopian joke. However, it just happened. That feeling, like waking up to a beetle, but sadly and thankfully still retaining human consciousness.

That might also be an unexpected birthday present. In the preface of Calvino's "Italian Fairy Tales", he said: "Once a person is alienated, divided, and reduced to an inhuman predicament, he can immediately understand the reality around him more accurately and deeply than when he is complete, and understand him. Something that is completely ignored or incomprehensible as a normal person."

What used to be an abstract theory for me has now become a tangible perception. When the big wave of the times came, everyone in this city and I were instantly submerged. We were in the deep water and couldn't breathe normally, but when we opened our eyes, we also saw a reality that we can't see or even understand. That is our book of Revelation, and what we get out of it will determine how we live in the future.

A few days ago, an out-of-town friend asked me how I was feeling. She knew that I had mild high blood pressure inherited from my family and was worried that my mood would be too fluctuating. Fortunately, I am not anxious, no sorrow or joy. Although I was in Pudong, the hardest-hit area, I found peace in the eyes of the storm.

I don’t know if others are like this, but when I look at the current densely occurring real events, I have both a sense of being in it and a sense of distance from looking back at history decades later. When you see that human life is like ants in this era, and you are only one step away from savagery, you need to calm down and think clearly about what you should do for the rest of your life.

I'm halfway through my life, and most likely there are only thirty or forty years left, and I can't waste it on those stupid things. What I can create and leave behind in the rest of my life will prove that I have lived, and will determine how long I will live after death.

My cousin called me once, and I talked about half of my life. She chuckled and said, "Brother, you are more optimistic than me. I don't think there are half as many days left." She is two years younger than me, but she said that when she remembered that her father had always been healthy, who would have thought that he would have a terminal illness in his 60s, life is so impermanent, and many of the desires in youth have faded, so let go of yourself and the child, and live a good life. Every day.

I am 45 years old. At the age of my father, I was already 18 years old and was facing the most severe juncture of the college entrance examination. It was a year that changed my life, as if it were yesterday, but too young to imagine what it would have been like to be as old as my father.

Looking back, my life so far has actually been smooth. If you take every nine years as a stage, it can be neatly divided into five sections: the first nine years, I only have some vague memories, as a little country boy, living in a place the size of a postage stamp; 10 years old, in the northwest My father came back for many years, and my life gradually became clearer, especially after entering high school, where I met Zhang Hui, a lifelong friend, both young people from small places. We had many similar visions for the world outside the island at that time. , that is a memory worth taking to the grave.

At the age of 18, after failing the college entrance examination, I ushered in the most serious mental crisis in my life. After thinking about it later, if disillusionment is going to happen sooner or later, it may be better to be disillusioned sooner. That year, my academic ideals were shattered, and although others may see it as a moan, it was no exaggeration for me at the time. A year later, I took my hair and pulled myself out of the mud.

After that, I haven't been beaten by anything. This spiritual crisis made me clearly realize that I am not a genius, and that my original dreams were riddled with holes. I was forced to restrain myself and live in the cracks of real life, but I still had to keep the remaining dreams that could not be extinguished. Descartes was right, "Only on the hopeless foundations of barren grass can the abode of the soul be built safely."

For the nine years after that, it was my barren adolescence. I was so busy after work that I couldn't read any books. When I started reading and writing again, I was 27 years old, and the dreams of my youth seemed far away. In the first two years, I remember some friends arguing about whether writing like Weizhou, which is difficult to classify, could be recognized by the academic world. To be honest, I haven't thought about it myself.

It was nine years of writing at will. I had my own job to support my family, and I didn’t expect to be able to support myself by writing. After all, it was too difficult in China. In 2013, Zhang Hui's untimely death hit me hard. I was 36 years old that year. For the first time, I felt that I was no longer in my prime, and I re-examined the meaning of my past life. Before that, I hadn't really lived.

At that time, I understood what Haruki Murakami said, beyond a certain age, the so-called life is nothing but a process of constant loss. One by one, the things that are precious to your life will slip out of your hand like a comb with teeth. But I would add that when these are lost, memory and writing are the only ways to preserve them. I will do everything in my power to make sure they live forever in my memory.

In the nine years since then, I've been through a lot. Of course, like many, the biggest hit will be the outbreak of 2020 and your own unemployment a few months later. Unlike when I was 18 years old, this time I accepted it calmly. For me, it was an opportunity to "change the way of living". Maybe there's nothing wrong with that.

In fact, I feel like I'm freer than I was in my earlier years, it's just that it's more inward than outward. I'm less succumbed to the reality of life, and more insistent on saving my time to do what I really want to do, because the time I have left is limited.

Of course, I know that the past as we know it has been repeatedly destroyed in the past two years, and it is in ruins. I don't even know when the next round of bombing will come. The deaf poet Ilya Kaminsky's short two-line poem "The Question," written in April 2018, is like a prophecy for our time: "What is a man? / The second of two consecutive bombings. silence between."

He was the same age as me, born in the Soviet Union under the Iron Curtain, came to the United States as a refugee in 1993, and began writing poetry the following year after his father died. He once said in an interview: "I chose English because no one in my family and friends understands the language, and no one who speaks to me can read what I write. I don't know the language myself, It was a parallel reality, a crazy and beautiful freedom. It still is."

I can understand how he feels, and sometimes I also feel (which may sound a bit unpleasantly arrogant) that even though I write in my native language, a lot of people around me don't understand my language either. The same language separates us.

I don't know any other skills, but I can still use words to create a mental bunker in which to live. This is what Hegel once said, that the artist would "conceive for himself and return to a peculiar isolation from the world which enables him to recover what has been lost".

The change of times will not end here, sometimes it is like the huge red wheel in Solzhenitsyn's pen, you lean on it and fall asleep, but it suddenly starts to turn with unstoppable force, arousing your senses. Clothing, even rolling your entire body into a giant gear mechanism. This is a horrific reality for each of us. Before being crushed, we need to leave evidence that we have actually lived, and there is no other way but to speak up and create.

Life is like a long journey, don't be impatient. As I pass middle age, I may carry more weight, and the road to travel may be more rugged, but because of this, I should not be impatient, that is just the daily life of life.

I'm wondering if there is such a possibility in Kafka's "Metamorphosis" - Gregory didn't suddenly find himself a beetle, but the fact that he was carrying a heavy carapace was the truth of his life, his life as a human being Just a dream. However, it doesn't matter. Having dreams and memories is also a good thing. It can also allow him to insist on himself when he discovers the cruel truth. "I used to be a person." This idea alone is indestructible.