Zhou Guoping’s classic prose: The Lost Years

一

When I was in college, often when I was concentrating on reading under the lamp, the lamp suddenly went out. This is the unanimous decision made by all the students in the dormitory for me: abide by school rules and turn off lights on time. How I hated the hand that pulled the switch. With a click, another day was cut off from my lifeline. Sitting in the darkness, staring at the dim moonlit window, I felt so wronged that my eyes welled up with tears.

The older I get, the faster time passes, but the more numb I seem to be. Day after day, the days disappear silently, like water droplets disappearing into the sea. Suddenly looking back, I have lived in this world for more than 10,000 days and nights, and they have disappeared.

"The Master said on the river: The deceased is like a man, and he does not give up day and night." In fact, time is such a river that allows us to stand on it, and the river flows by us, but I still So I? Time is not something passing by me, but my life. What abandoned me was not the days on the calendar, but the years of my life; it was not even just my years, but myself. Not only can I not get back the lost years, but I can’t get back the person I used to be.

When I think back to the me a long time ago, for example, to the tearful me in the university dormitory, what always appears in front of me is the shadow of an orphan who was ruthlessly abandoned in the past. Over the years. He was alone, without any friends, hoping in vain to return to the world of the living, but in fact he was inexorably carried further and further away by the past years. I reached out, but I couldn't reach him and take him back. I called loudly, but my voice could not reach his ears. I have to admit that this is a kind of death. I have become a dead person in the past, and my memory of him has the same nature as the memory of a dead person.

二

Since ancient times, I don’t know how many people have asked: What is time? Where is it? People ask and think hard in time, but they cannot get an answer, and they are forever forgotten by time. Taken away.

Where is the time? Where are the people who have been taken away by time?

In order to measure time, our ancestors invented the calendar, so humans have history and individuals have ages. Age represents - the time an individual has had from birth to the present. Do you really have them? Where are they?

It’s always like this: because of the loss of childhood, we know that we have grown up; because of the loss of years, we know that we are alive; because of the loss, we know time.

We call what we have lost the past, what we have not yet obtained is the future, and what we have in our hands is the present. But time does not stop, now it has become the past, what do we have?

How many late nights, I stayed under the lamp, unwilling to let the day end. Yet, even if I stay up all night, the day is still over. There is no way we can keep time.

We can never possess time, but time controls our destiny. In its broad and boundless palm, our short life is presented at the same time. It doesn't matter the past, present or future. Our life and death, happiness and disaster have already been recorded.

However, since the past no longer exists, the present is fleeting, and the future does not yet exist, is there really time in the world? Who is this invisible person who has the power of life and death for all living things in the world?

I imagine myself to be a statue on the grass, witnessing generations of children coming from afar, gradually growing up, falling in love and having fun beside me, and then slowly aging and hobbling. Then walked away. I recognized myself among them, walking the same route as everyone else. I glared at him anxiously and motioned for him to stop, but he ignored me. Now he had passed me and moved on. I watched sadly as he irreparably aged and died.

三

Many years later, I returned to the city where I was born. An old classmate from primary school accompanied me through the old streets that still looked the same. He suddenly pointed at an ugly woman sitting at the door of a house on the street and quietly told me that she was our classmate so-and-so. I quickly turned away, unable to believe that my former idol looked like this. There are many beautiful faces preserved in my heart, but once we meet again, all of them will be shattered immediately.

We always think that a certain snack we tasted in childhood was the sweetest, a certain piece of music we listened to in childhood was the most beautiful, and a certain scenery we saw in childhood was the most beautiful. "Happy years are the lost years." You can get back the snacks, music, and scenery, but you can't get back the years. Therefore, the same snack is no longer so sweet, the same tune is no longer so beautiful, and the same scenery is no longer so beautiful.

When I was sitting in the cinema watching a movie, I knew that human color photography technology had made extraordinary progress, but I still couldn’t find colors as bright as the slides I saw when I was a child. . The lost years are like those slides, shining in the memory with the brilliance of happiness that can never be reached.

Every time I go back to my alma mater, I have to linger for a long time outside the window of the dormitory where I used to live. There is still the hibiscus plant in front of the window, but it has neither died nor grown up after all these years.

I wanted to go inside and see if the old me was still there. From then to now, I have been to many places and had many encounters, but could all of this be an illusion? Maybe, I am still the same me, but I just walked away for a while? Maybe, there is no time at all, only a lot of We exist at the same time, maybe we will meet suddenly somewhere? But I finally did not enter the room, because I knew that my dormitory was occupied by strangers, and they would regard me as an intruder, even though in my eyes, they are me Intruders into the sacred years of youth.

Guided by memories, we look for old friends and revisit old places, trying to regain the feeling of the past, but in vain. We finally discovered with sadness that what disappeared with time was not only our childhood and youth, but also a complete world composed of the people, trees, houses, streets, and sky of that year, including our love and sorrow, and our feelings. And mood, our entire spiritual world back then.

IV

However, I still don’t believe that time has taken away everything. The lost years, our most precious childhood and youth years, we must have kept them in a safe place somehow. We have forgotten the location of the treasure, but there must be such a place, otherwise we would not pursue it so hard. In other words, there is a secret room in the soul, which contains all the treasures of our past, but we can’t recall the password to unlock it despite our best efforts. However, there may be a time when we accidentally hit the right password, and the secret room opens and we are back in the past.

When Proust’s protagonist takes a piece of madeleine soaked in tea and suddenly feels a strange pleasure and tremor, he has hit the right password. A current feeling, maybe a taste, a breath, a melody, a piece of sunshine on the stone slab, coincides with the long forgotten feeling, and thus mixes into the past state of mind connected with this feeling, so the past Life scenes emerge from this state of mind.

In fact, everyone’s life is full of opportunities for this kind of Proustian happiness. When triggered by this opportunity, we will have a feeling that something is familiar yet missing. However, few people seize this opportunity like Proust and promote the return of time. We are always living in front of our eyes, busy with external affairs. Our days are fragmented and lack inherent continuity. The passing years are like undeveloped negatives, piled up in a darkroom. They are still there, but what is the difference between us losing them forever?

　五

What makes a poet a poet is that he is more sensitive to the passage of time than ordinary people. Poetry It was the refuge he built himself to escape from this passing time. There are three ways to get rid of time: live in memories and make the past eternal; live in the passion of the moment and make the present eternal; live in expectation and make the future eternal. However, imaginary eternity cannot prevent the actual passage of time. Therefore, memories are sad, expectations are confusing, and the passion of the moment is mixed with ecstasy and despair. No wonder one of the most optimistic poets also shouted:

"The hour hand indicates the moment, but what can indicate eternity?"

The poet has a tragic mission: to turn the moment into Eternity, freedom from time within time.

Who can live outside time and truly have eternity?

Children and God.

Children don’t care about the passage of time. In the eyes of children, the years are endless. The reason why childhood is nostalgic is because we once had eternity in childhood. However, children will grow up and we will eventually lose our childhood. Our childhood ends on the day we know we are going to die. Since we lost our childhood, we have also lost eternity.

Since then, the only eternity I have known is the infinite duration of time after my death, my eternal non-existence.

And what about God? How willing I am to sing praises to God with St. Augustine: "Your years have no future and are always now. Our yesterdays and tomorrows have passed and come in your today." "How I wish there was an eternal mirror in the world that reflects all my treasures that have been stolen by time, including my life. However, I know that God is only a refuge for poets!

When I was very young, I secretly kept a diary myself. The diary at the beginning was very childish, just writing about what good things I ate today and so on. I seemed to instinctively realize that the good taste fades easily, so I wanted to keep it in words. As I get older, I have retained many good feelings in words: love, friendship, loneliness, joy, pain? In a disaster in my youth, I burned all my diaries. I later learned the gravity of this move and cried over the true death of my past years. However, the habit of writing continued. I kept transferring the best parts of myself to my words, and in the end, Rome was no longer Rome, and I escaped the passage of time.

Still imaginary? However, for a person who has lost his childhood and does not believe in God, what else can he do?

The above is what the composition column brings to you. Zhou Guoping's prose "The Lost Years", I hope you will like it, thank you for reading.

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