在田庄里
接近傍晚的时候,我一个人在田庄里散步。
到达田庄,从城市边缘最后一栋民房消失算起,车子在崎岖的山路上也走了将近半个小时。实在是太安静了,安静得除了自然的声音,其余什么都没有。有鱼儿嫌水里闷热,“啪”地跳出水面来的声音;有长尾缝叶莺因突然间见到我的身影而尖叫着飞进草丛里的声音;有巴黎翠凤蝶在花丛中轻曼地飞舞着巨大翅膀的声音;有蚱蜢的叫声;也有蜥蜴踩落枝头枯叶的声音。
远处是延伸至山里的湖水,发着碎银般的锡色光芒。近处是池塘,睡莲一丛又一丛,安详地躺在水面上,有那么几朵花,羞答答地开着。到处都是龙眼树,果实累累,伸手摘几颗,边走边吃,琐屑的皮壳再丢进水里,激起一点儿涟漪,有调皮的鱼儿嬉戏,顶了几下果壳,逃逸了。
到僻远的乡下住一住,哪怕是一个晚上,也都是改换生活方式的办法。田庄藏在群山深处,除了零星的客人,再不用担心有任何人会来。田庄里的电视只能收到三、两个台,手机信号时有时无。田庄里没有电脑,更没有互联网,田庄就是田庄,和外面的世界几乎失了所有的联系。车子进山的时候,我就在想,没有电视没有网络没有电话,要好好地睡上一个晚上。
手机短信传来时,我正在向高处登,去看路边树上落着的一只黑伯劳,它叫得很响很凄烈。
停下来。在高处,手机又有了时断时续的信号。打开信息:小青,我换了岗位,已到首长办公室工作。
头部温度急剧升高,兴奋,也有些别的感觉。合上手机,抬头看,伯劳不见了。
和他有好久没联系了。他突然升迁,这可以称得上是升迁。首长秘书虽然位轻职低,但熟悉中国行政运作的人都知道,秘书有一种看不见摸不着的特异力量,能跟首长一起干活,这就是升迁。我是高兴,很高兴,我们一直都是很要好的朋友,朋友有了好事,我肯定要高兴。可接着,又有些莫名的感触。身边的人都在向上走,做官的做官,挣钱的挣钱,唯有自己如水中石,任凭冲刷,纹丝不动。原来还是一起玩的朋友,一条信息,仿佛立了一条无形的高墙,我们之间是有差距的人了。潘基文做了联合国秘书长,对我一点儿影响都没有,但身边的朋友不停地高就,就仿佛一件件惊天动地的大事儿,冲击自己,只因为这些事儿和自己有关。
不容迟疑,发了条短信回复:恭喜,祝前途似锦。
一条短信抹去了湖畔的所有美景。我想我该请他吃餐饭祝贺。但又想,有太长时间没联系了,他一升迁,我就要请他吃饭,这不分明是巴结么?又想,还是要请他,以后找他能做的事情多了,他借助首长的权力可以把视野开阔得无边,集权社会,首长一句话,小市民一辈子做不到的事情都可以轻而易举地解决。又想,请他不好,虽然是朋友,但以前不少事都不太融洽,就算是吃了餐饭,又能怎么样?又想,还得请他吃餐饭,一个人再怎么不问世事,也总还得生活在社会里,要做的事情多着呢,况且庆祝一下没什么不好。
再发短信:明晚一起吃饭,下班后。
没怎么注意,我已经走出去了好远,夕阳投在湖面上,波光粼粼,好看,但是没心思看了。
有回复:明晚有工作安排,走不开。暂定周末。
蝙蝠飞得倒早,太阳还没等落山,它们就出来舞蹈。山不是山,水不是水,眼里是山水,心中再无山水。接触的圈子不同了,和他还有交往的必要么?大家到了一起,又都能谈些什么呢?自己早都不想在世俗界继续追求什么东西,能维持下去就好,怎么突然一下子产生了那么多庸俗的想法?为什么要去借别人的舞台表演,自己没有能力就算了,有必要攀朋友的大树么?
一边走,一边想了太多。从最初的交往,到中间的互不信任,到后来的和好,到后来的渐渐失去联系,两个人之间的历史如纪录片样一幕一幕地闪现,有的真切,有的模糊,有的近于想象。不觉间,已到了旅舍。天色渐暗下来,躺在床上,反思,回味,看夜色吞没了窗外的低山。
一条短信,在远离城市的乡下,还是可以把人搅得心神不宁。一个人如果有颗世俗的心,无论他走到哪里,还都是俗不可耐。我开始后悔把手机带出旅舍,也后悔没把手机关掉。一条短信,害了我的一天假期。翻了几页书,脑袋里还是想着朋友的事儿。和他联系,这是个机会,以后主动联系他的人无数;不和他联系,这也是个机会,他很快便会忙得忘掉所有的朋友。夜里,睡得很不好,醒来好几次。窗外恐怖的叫声该是猫头鹰的。
起床很早。开了窗子,阳光灿烂得一蹋糊涂。没有风,田庄一如昨晚,静谧,温和。
这美妙的自然正等待我去享受,干嘛要被俗事缠身不得解脱。沿着昨晚的路去散步,莲塘里多了一只池鹭,不时地在叶子上跳跃,等待时机捕鱼。清新的空气洁净着我的胸我的脑,长长地吹了一口气,闭上眼睛,感觉一切都那么澄明。掏出手机,信号又来了。
给他发个信息:周末我出去野营。
短信化成一条线,从屏幕上消失了。心理的负担便如巨石落地,连眼睛也亮了好多。
红蜻蜓在晨光下上下飞舞。野牡丹开得茂盛极了,无比地艳丽。路旁的小黄花一片又一片,居然有蜗牛整个夜都住在那花里面。看了看时间,距离中午发车还有近四个小时,够我逍遥的了。于是,再次钻进桂圆林里,挑大的摘,挑甜的吃,挑小的扔。林子里,黄皮也熟了,吃起来蛮甜酸的。
午后,车子快速地飞进市区。从高处而下,鳞次栉比的高楼大厦逐一浮现。如果城市是真实的,那么就是自己有些虚幻。我知道自己在变,在变得不伦不类,几乎所有的东西我都在抛弃。我开始怀疑,有一天,我会不会被这个社会抛弃?
2007/7/19
- Re: 在田庄里posted on 07/19/2007
青冈,怎么舒服怎么来,你会比谁都幸福,共勉!
- Re: 在田庄里posted on 07/19/2007
虽然青冈的有些观点我不认同,甚至很反感,青冈自己知道,茶社,你的咖啡馆的那些争论等等,但你的真实倒是很让人佩服。
很多人体会过这样的心情,能有几个敢写出来。
这篇要顶。 - Re: 在田庄里posted on 07/19/2007
青冈,把包袱放下,真正的朋友,不是冲着你的优点来的,而是相反,是冲着你缺点来的,当一个人真正接受你的任何缺点时,他就是你的朋友了,所以,你不必过于在乎他的想法,把真实的你展示给他就行。能否成为朋友,不必刻意为之,这也是一种缘分,随缘吧。 - Re: 在田庄里posted on 07/19/2007
abc wrote:今天看帖子,才知道是马哥也来了。谢谢。:)
青冈,怎么舒服怎么来,你会比谁都幸福,共勉!
- Re: 在田庄里posted on 07/19/2007
小曼 wrote:观点不认同这都是正常的,不怕。不伤感情就好。:)
虽然青冈的有些观点我不认同,甚至很反感,青冈自己知道,茶社,你的咖啡馆的那些争论等等,但你的真实倒是很让人佩服。
很多人体会过这样的心情,能有几个敢写出来。不怕吧,这没什么,也都是小人物的生活轨迹。
- Re: 在田庄里posted on 07/19/2007
守望古典 wrote:
青冈,把包袱放下,真正的朋友,不是冲着你的优点来的,而是相反,是冲着你缺点来的,当一个人真正接受你的任何缺点时,他就是你的朋友了,所以,你不必过于在乎他的想法,把真实的你展示给他就行。能否成为朋友,不必刻意为之,这也是一种缘分,随缘吧。
古典说得好。
晚上朋友电话我吃饭,所以这篇文字没超过一天,就过时了。
人过了三十,就复杂得要命,有时候复杂得让自己感觉到恶心,但是没办法。 - posted on 07/19/2007
qinggang wrote:
人过了三十,就复杂得要命,有时候复杂得让自己感觉到恶心,但是没办法。
(Chinese input seems not working for me now)
QG, I read your every writing about daily life of ordinary people. Your work, even though you claimed that you write for your now still infant daughter, reminds me of Vermeer's paintings. They are like arts of calm & order communicating through narrative on those everyday scenes. The ability and mind-set to be able to have the serenity of mood is perhaps a gift of yours that runs in your blood.
I am sure you will be much more productive than Vermeer. At least you seem lucky enough (comparing to many of us living overseas) that you do no need to work hard to earn or secure a living in your early 30s. You are lucky enough to have the luxury to feel sophisticated, so just enjoy it. And wait for the big 40 to come, when you are supposed to be clear-minded, when thousand times of short messages from your friend won't even raise a single hair on your eyebrow.
:-) - posted on 07/20/2007
Great thanks for rzp’s encouragement.and great thanks for your wasting time reading my babbles.
all the encouragements from mayacafe make me love here.:)
I am now accumulating literary materials for my baby girl so that she can finish her PHD dissertation in the future (if she likes)basing on her fathers’s diary-a ordinary intellectual’s daily life in the upper part of 21st century.:)
Maybe when my daughter is in her twenties,I can finish 3 million characters rubbish or more .:)
I want to write more better just like my idol Linda does.:)
Vermeer you pointed in the reply must be this one,a good person ,I think.I google him and post here:
Johannes Vermeer or Jan Vermeer (baptized October 31, 1632, died December 15, 1675) was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of ordinary bourgeois life. His entire life was spent in the town of Delft. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial painter in his lifetime. He seems to have never been particularly wealthy, perhaps due to the fact that he produced relatively few paintings, leaving his wife and eleven children in debt at his death.
Virtually forgotten for nearly two hundred years, in 1866 the art critic Thoré Bürger published an essay attributing 66 pictures to him (only 35 paintings are firmly attributed to him today). Since that time Vermeer's reputation has grown, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, and is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.
rzp wrote:
qinggang wrote:(Chinese input seems not working for me now)
人过了三十,就复杂得要命,有时候复杂得让自己感觉到恶心,但是没办法。
QG, I read your every writing about daily life of ordinary people. Your work, even though you claimed that you write for your now still infant daughter, reminds me of Vermeer's paintings. They are like arts of calm & order communicating through narrative on those everyday scenes. The ability and mind-set to be able to have the serenity of mood is perhaps a gift of yours that runs in your blood.
I am sure you will be much more productive than Vermeer. At least you seem lucky enough (comparing to many of us living overseas) that you do no need to work hard to earn or secure a living in your early 30s. You are lucky enough to have a luxury to feel sophisticated, so just enjoy it. And wait for the big 40 to come, when you are supposed to be clear-minded, where thousand times of short messages from your friend won't even raise a single hair on your eyebrow.
:-) - posted on 07/20/2007
more about Vermeer.
===========================
Relatively little is known about Vermeer's life. The only sources of information are some registers, a few official documents and comments by other artists.
[edit] Youth
Milkmaid (1658-1660)
Johannes Vermeer was born in 1632, in the city of Delft in the Netherlands. The precise date of his birth is unknown but it is known that he was baptised on October 31, 1632, in the Reformed Church in Delft.
Vermeer's father, Reynier Vermeer[1], was a lower middle-class silk weaver and an art dealer. He married Johannes' mother, Digna, a woman from Antwerp, in 1615. The Vermeer family bought a large inn, the "Mechelen" named after the homonymous Belgian town, near the market square in Delft in 1641. Reynier Vermeer probably served as inn-keeper while also acting as a merchant of paintings.
After his father's death in 1652, Johannes Vermeer inherited the Mechelen as well as his father's art-dealing business.
[edit] Marriage and family
Despite the fact that he came from a Protestant family, he married a Catholic, named Catherina Bolnes, in April 1653. It was an unlikely marriage: in addition to the religious difference (Catholics were a discriminated-against and unpopular religious minority in mainly Calvinist Holland, threatened by Catholic France[citation needed]), Bolnes' family was significantly wealthier than Vermeer's. Vermeer may have converted to Catholicism shortly before their marriage, a conversion suggested by the fact that his children were named after Catholic saints rather than his own parents, and one of his paintings, The Allegory of Faith, reflects Catholic belief in the Eucharist, though whether that is the artist's or that of a commissioning patron is unknown.
Some time after their marriage, the couple left the Mechelen and moved in with Catherina's mother, Maria Thins, a well-off widow, in a house in the "Papist corner" of the town, where the Catholics lived in relative isolation. Vermeer would live in his mother-in-law's house with his wife and children for the rest of his life.
Maria apparently played an important role in their life, for they named their first daughter after her, and it is possible that she used her comfortable income to help support the struggling painter and his growing family. Maria Thins was a devotee of the Jesuit order in the Catholic Church, and this, too, seems to have influenced Johannes and Catherina, for they called their first son Ignatius, after the founding saint of the Jesuit Order.
Johannes and Catherina had fourteen children in total, three of whom predeceased Vermeer.
[edit] Career
The Girl with a Wine Glass, 1660
Vermeer was apprenticed as a painter, but it is not certain where he studied, nor with whom. It is generally believed that he studied in Delft and that his teacher was either Carel Fabritius (1622 - 1654) or Leonaert Bramer (1596 - 1674).[2]
On the 29th of December 1653, Vermeer became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke, a trade association for painters. The guild's records, which indicate that he could not initially pay the admission fee, hint that Vermeer had financial difficulties.
In later years he evidently was well established: one of the town's richest citizens, Pieter van Ruijven, became his patron and bought many of his paintings. If he indeed completed only a small number of paintings, his income probably[citation needed] relied largely on his business as an art dealer. In 1662 he was elected head of the guild and was reelected in 1663, 1670, and 1671, evidence that he was considered an established craftsman among his peers, and a respectable middle-class citizen.
However, a severe economic downturn struck the Netherlands after 1672 (the "Rampjaar"), when the French invaded the Dutch Republic in what was later known as the Franco-Dutch War. This led to a collapse in demand for luxury items such as paintings, and consequently damaged Vermeer's business both as a painter and an art dealer. With a large family to support, Vermeer was forced to borrow money.
When Johannes Vermeer died in 1675, he left Catherina and their children with very little money and several debts. In a written document his wife attributed her husband's death to the stress of financial pressures. Catherina asked the city council to take over the estate, including paintings, in order to pay off the debts. The Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who worked for the city council, was appointed trustee for the estate in 1676. Nineteen of Vermeer's paintings were bequeathed to Catherina and Maria; Catherina sold some of these paintings to pay creditors.
In Delft, Vermeer had been a respected artist, but he was almost unknown outside his home town, and the fact that a local patron, van Ruijven, purchased much of his output reduced the possibility of his fame spreading. Vermeer's relatively short life, the demands of separate careers, and his extraordinary precision as a painter all help to explain his limited output. It is assumed[attribution needed] that some of his paintings were lost after his death.
[edit] Technique
Vermeer produced transparent colours by applying paint onto the canvas in loosely granular layers, a technique called pointillé (not to be confused with pointillism). No drawings have been securely attributed to Vermeer, and his paintings offer few clues to preparatory methods. David Hockney, among other historians and advocates of the Hockney-Falco thesis, has speculated that Vermeer used a camera obscura to achieve precise positioning in his compositions, and this view seems to be supported by certain light and perspective effects which would result from the use of such lenses and not the naked eye alone; however, the extent of Vermeer's dependence upon the camera obscura is disputed by historians.
There is no other seventeenth century artist who from very early on in his career employed, in the most lavish way, the exorbitantly expensive pigment lapis lazuli, natural ultramarine. Not only do we see it used in elements that are intended to be shown as blue, like a woman’s skirt, a sky, the headband on the Girl with a Pearl Earring (The Hague), and in the satin dress of his late A Lady Seated at a Virginal (London).
Vermeer also used the lapis lazuli widely as underpaint in, for example, the deep yet murky shadow area below the windows in The Music Lesson (London), and The Glass of Wine (Berlin). For the wall beneath the windows - areas in these paintings of intense shadow - Vermeer composed by first applying a dark natural ultramarine, thus indicating an area void of light. Over this first layer he then scumbled varied layers of earth colours in order to give the wall a certain appearance: the earth colours umber and ochre should be understood as warm light from the strongly lit interior, reflecting its multiple colours back onto the wall.
This working method most probably was inspired by Vermeer’s understanding of Leonardo’s observations that the surface of every object partakes of the colour of the adjacent object.[3] This means that no object is ever seen entirely in its natural colour.
A comparable but even more remarkable yet effectual use of natural ultramarine is in The Girl with a Wineglass (Braunsweig). The shadows of the red satin dress are underpainted in natural ultramarine, and due to this underlying blue paint layer, the red lake and vermilion mixture applied over it acquires a slightly purple, cool and crisp appearance that is most powerful.
Even after Vermeer’s supposed financial breakdown following the so-called rampjaar (year of disaster) in 1672, he continued to employ natural ultramarine most generously, such as in the above-mentioned "Lady Seated at a Virginal." This could suggest that Vermeer was supplied with materials by a collector, and would coincide with John Michael Montias’ theory of Pieter Claesz. van Ruijven being Vermeer’s patron.
Officer and a Laughing Girl, 1657-59
[edit] Themes
Vermeer painted mostly domestic interior scenes. His works are largely genre pieces and portraits, with the exception of two cityscapes.
His subjects offer a cross-section of seventeenth century Dutch society, ranging from the portrayal of a simple milkmaid at work, to the luxury and splendour of rich notables and merchantmen in their roomy houses. Religious and scientific connotations can be found in his works.
[edit] Influence of other painters
• Carel Fabritius (1622–1654) who spent his final years in Delft. Vermeer's ideas about perspective, and his tendency to paint everyday themes were possibly influenced by Fabritius.
• Italian painter Caravaggio (1573–1610), indirectly through Dutch followers.
• Leonaert Bramer, another painter from Delft, and witness to his marriage.
• Vermeer owned a Dirck van Baburen painting, which appears in two of Vermeer's paintings.
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