Lyric prose by borrowing scenery

Author: Yu Dafu

Autumn, no matter where, is always good; However, the autumn in the north is particularly clear, quiet and sad. The reason why I have traveled thousands of miles from Hangzhou to Qingdao, and even from Qingdao to Peiping, is to enjoy this "autumn", the autumn flavor of this old capital.

Jiangnan, of course, there is autumn; But the grass is carved slowly, the air is moist, the sky is pale, and it often rains and windy; A person sandwiched between Suzhou, Shanghai, Hangzhou, or Xiamen, Hong Kong and Guangzhou can only feel a little cool. The taste, color, artistic conception and posture of autumn are always insufficient, lacking in taste and enjoyment. Autumn is not a famous flower, nor is it wine. Half-drunk is not suitable for enjoying autumn.

It has been nearly ten years since autumn in the north. Every autumn in the south, I always think of the reed flowers in Taoranting, the willow shadows in Diaoyutai, the insects in Xishan, the jathyapple in Yuquan and the bells in Tanzhe Temple. Even if you don't go out in Beiping, you can rent a shabby house and live in the sea of people in the imperial city. Get up in the morning, make a bowl of strong tea and sit in the yard, you can see the high blue sky and hear the pigeons flying in the blue sky. From the bottom of Sophora japonica leaves, counting a ray of sunshine leaking to the east, or in the broken waist, facing the blue morning glory like morning glory, you can naturally feel the autumn breath. When it comes to morning glory, I think blue or white is the best, followed by purple and black, and pink is the lowest. It is best to have a few sparse and slender autumn grasses as a foil at the bottom of the morning glory.

The locust tree in the northland is also an ornament that can remind people of Qiu Lai. Like flowers, but not flowers, they will spread all over the floor in the morning. When you step on it, there is no sound, no smell, only a little tiny and soft touch. After sweeping the street in the shade, the silk pattern of the broom falling on the dust looks exquisite, leisurely and subconsciously lonely. The ancient dream that the world knows autumn is in these depths.

Qiu Chan's faint lingering sound is a specialty of the north; Because there are trees everywhere in Beiping and the houses are low, you can hear them singing everywhere. In the south, you have to go to the suburbs or the mountains to hear Qiu Chan's cry, which is like a cricket and a mouse in Beiping and a housefly that every household keeps at home.

There is also autumn rain. The autumn rain in the north seems to be stranger, more delicious and more decent than that in the south.

Under the gloomy sky, a cool breeze suddenly came and it began to rain. It rained a layer, the clouds gradually rolled to the west, the sky turned blue again, and the sun appeared again; Wearing thick green shirts or jackets, idle people in the city bite their pipes and walk up and stand under the bridge in the shadow of the oblique bridge after the rain. When they meet acquaintances, they will use a slow tone and say with a sigh:

"Oh, it's cold-""This word is pronounced very high and dragged on for a long time. )

"Isn't it? A layer of autumn rain is cold! "

Northerners always read array characters like layers of words, which are flat and even. This mispronounced rhyme is just right.

Fruit trees in the north are also a miracle for Qiu Lai. The first is jujube; It will grow up in the corner, on the wall, beside the toilet and at the door of the kitchen. This is the heyday of autumn. Like olives and pigeon eggs, jujube trees show light green and yellow in small oval leaves. Jujube leaves fall, jujube is red, and there will be a northwest wind. Convenience in the north is a dusty world. Only these dates, persimmons and grapes ripen at the turn of July and August, which is a good day for clear autumn in the north and the best golden day of the year.

Some critics say that China's bachelor of arts, especially poets, are full of decadent colors, so there are many words praising autumn in China's poems. But what about foreign poets? Although I don't read many foreign poems and essays, and I don't want to write bills for autumn poems and essays, if you look through the collected works of poets in Britain, Germany, France, Italy and other countries, or the philosophy of peace in poetry and essays in various countries, you can always see a lot of praises and lamentations about autumn. There is always a part about autumn in the long pastoral poems or four seasons poems of famous great poets. It is the best and the most interesting. It serves to show that sentient animals and interesting human beings can always cause deep, distant, severe and bleak feelings for autumn. Not only a poet, but also a prisoner in prison. In autumn, I think I will feel a kind of affection that I can't have; Autumn belongs to people, so there is no country, let alone the difference between race and class. In China, there is an idiom "autumn scholar" in the text, and there are very common readers such as Ouyang Zi's Autumn Sound and Su Dongpo's Red Cliff Fu, so we feel that the relationship between China literati and autumn is particularly deep. However, the strong smell of autumn, especially in China, can only be felt in the north.

Autumn in the south, of course, also has its unique places, such as the bright moon on the Twenty-four Bridges, the autumn tide in Qiantang River, the cool fog in Putuo Mountain, the residual lotus in Lizhi Bay and so on. , but the color is not strong and the aftertaste is not lasting. Compared with Qiu Lai in the north, it is like yellow rice wine and dry rice, porridge and steamed bread, bass and crabs, yellow dogs and camels.

Autumn, autumn in the north, if I can stay, I would like to fold two-thirds of my life for a third of it. There are several acres of clear ponds and lotus ponds in front of Qingyun Ji Xianlin Building. I remember that when I first moved here more than 30 years ago, there seemed to be lotus flowers in the pond, and there were still some broken shadows of green leaves and safflower in my memory. Later, things changed, and the years passed, but the pond became "half an acre of square pond opened, the sky was high and the clouds were light", and the lotus flowers were never seen again. I keep a lot of old ideas in my mind. Every time I look at an empty pond, I always feel as if something is missing. This is not in line with my aesthetic concept. There should be something green in the pond, even reeds are better than nothing. The best and most ideal is of course the lotus. In China's old poems, there are simply too many descriptions of lotus flowers. Zhou Dunyi's On Ailian is probably unique. His famous phrase "Xiang Yuan Qing Xiang" is well known. It can almost be said that there is no one in China who doesn't love lotus flowers. But the pond in front of our building is the only one lacking lotus flowers. Every time I see or think about it, I always feel that I am a heart disease.

Someone came from Hubei and brought some lotus seeds from Honghu Lake. The shell is black and hard. It is said that if buried in mud, it can be preserved for thousands of years. So, I used a hammer to crack a crack in the lotus seed, so that the shower head would break out of its shell and never be buried in the mud. These are subjective wishes, and it is extremely unknown whether the lotus buds can come out. Anyway, I finally tried my best to put five or six broken lotus seeds into the pond. This is my destiny. In this way, I have one more job every day: go to the pond several times more. I always hope that one day, suddenly, "Xiao He shows sharp corners" and green lotus leaves grow out of the water. However, contrary to expectations, in the first year of throwing, nothing appeared on the water until the autumn leaves fell. After a lonely winter day, the next year, spring water filled the pond with green willows, which was a beautiful scene. However, there is still no lotus leaf on the water I expected. At this time, I was completely disheartened, thinking about those hard-shell lotus seeds brought by Hubei, probably because of unexplained reasons, there is no hope of planting lotus seeds anymore. My eyes can't suck lotus leaves out of the mud.

However, in the third year, a miracle suddenly happened. One day, I suddenly found some round green leaves growing where I threw lotus seeds. Although the color is extremely pleasing, it is thin, lying on the water like the leaves of a water lily. Only five or six leaves grew at first. I always feel a little too little, and I always hope to grow a few more pieces. So, I look forward to the stars and the moon, and go to the pond every day. There are farmers outside the school to catch aquatic plants. I always ask them to be merciful and not to break the leaves. But after a long summer, sad autumn came to the world again, leaving only five or six lonely leaves floating in the pond. For me, this is another hopeful but still depressing year. The real miracle appeared in the fourth year. After the severe winter, the pond overflowed with springs. When the lotus grows leaves, a large green leaf suddenly grows where there were five or six leaves last year, and it seems that the lotus has not stopped moving under the severe winter ice, because leaves have also grown in the middle of the pond far from the original base of five or six leaves.

The speed and range of blade expansion are amazing. Within a few days, a large part of the pond has been covered with green leaves. Moreover, the leaves that used to lie flat on the water like water lilies gathered strength from somewhere, and some actually jumped out of the water and grew into slender lotus leaves. It turned out that I had been suspicious for a long time, fearing that water lilies were growing in the pool, not real lotus flowers. In this way, the doubt in my heart was swept away: the descendants of Honghu lotus really grew in the pond. I was ecstatic, and these years have finally not been in vain. Everything in the world comes into being. Animals, plants and other creatures, including people, are always endowed with an extremely amazing survival force and an extremely amazing expansion and diffusion force, which is irresistible. As long as you are willing to take the trouble to observe, you will certainly admit it. What is in front of me now is the lotus in the pond in front of my building. As several brave blades jumped out of the water, many blades followed. Overnight, dozens of branches appeared, and they spread quickly. In less than ten days, lotus leaves have covered the whole pond. From where I planted my seeds, I spread to the east, west, north and south. I can't know how the lotus moves in the mud in deep water. Anyway, judging from the lotus leaves above the water, it takes at least half a foot to form this situation. Planting lotus leaves is definitely not enough.

Lotus flowers come one after another. According to experts who know lotus flowers, the lotus flowers in the pond in front of my house are different from those in other ponds in Yanyuan. The color of lotus flowers in other places is light red; And my lotus here is not only red, but also has many petals. Each flower can produce sixteen lotus petals, so it certainly looks different. These dazzling red lotus flowers, hanging high above the lotus leaves, pose in the wind as if dazzling everything. When I was young, I read an old poem: "After all, in mid-June, the scenery of the West Lake was different from that at four o'clock." The lotus leaf on the second day is infinitely blue, and the lotus flower on the second day is of different colors. "I love the beauty of his poems and deeply regret that I can't go to Hangzhou West Lake to enjoy them in person. Now the pond in front of my house is the scenery of the West Lake. It was I who moved the West Lake from Hangzhou to Yanyuan. Isn't it great and satisfying? Mr. Zhou Yiliang moved to Longrun Garden only a few years ago. His name is "Collection". I find it interesting and grateful. Shall I pass the lotus? The year before and last year, when the lotus flowers were blooming in Summer Moon Lake, I walked around the pond at least several times a day, sitting on a stone and quietly sucking the fragrance of lotus and lotus leaves. " The cicada forest is quieter and Tonamiyama is more secluded. "I really feel very quiet around. I sat there silently, and what I saw on the water was the green manure and red manure of the lotus.

The reflection is reflected in the water. When the wind blows, a lotus petal falls into the water and falls from above, while the reflection in the water falls from bottom to top, and finally touches the water surface. The two become one and float there like a boat. I once read two sentences in a poem: "The pond flowers fall in shadow, and the sand birds fly with the sound." The author deeply regrets that the second sentence is no good. No wonder, how many people can realize the realm of "a pool of flowers falls on the shadow"? In the evening, my family often sits on the stones by the pond to enjoy the cool. One night, the moon in the sky was bright and bright, and a piece of silver light was sprinkled on the lotus. I suddenly heard a "plop". Mao Mao, my little white Persian cat, jumped into the water. She probably thought there was a white jade plate in the water and wanted to jump on it and catch it. As soon as she entered the water, she probably felt something was wrong. She quickly returned to the shore and broke the reflection of the moon. It took her a long time to get back to her original shape. This summer, the weather is extremely sultry, but the lotus flowers are in full bloom. Green covers the sky, red flowers reflect the sun, and a pond that is not too small is so full that even the water surface can hardly be seen. A neighbor who loves lotus flowers counts the number of lotus flowers cheerfully every day. Tell me today that there are four or five hundred flowers; Tell me tomorrow that there are six or seven hundred flowers. However, although I know he is meticulous, I don't believe he can really count the exact number of flowers.

I don't know how many bones are hidden under the lotus leaf and between the stones, which is hard to see on the shore. It is roughly estimated that there will be nearly 1000 flowers this year. This is really a magnificent view. The weather has suddenly turned cold these days, as if it had suddenly turned from summer to autumn. Although the lotus leaf in the pond is still green, it seems that the day of becoming a residual lotus will not be too far away. In another month or two, even the residual load will disappear without a trace when the water freezes. At that time, the lotus will probably hibernate under the ice and dream of spring. Their dreams will surely come true. "Winter has come, can spring be far behind?" I wish my "congratulations"