Victor's Pursuit of Serenity Chapter 18

One of the shortcomings of parallel prose is that this parallel style makes people's brains lazy, and they focus on literal connections instead of thinking one step further. For example, there are two sentences in Su Yan's "Autumn Clothes Long": "Sometimes birds sing in the willows in the courtyard, and insects chirp in the hall; the fallen leaves are mixed together, and the fallen petals scatter the fragrance." On the surface, the previous and next sentences of the parallelism each talk about one thing, but in fact the latter is subject to the former. Once the previous sentence is written, the second sentence follows, and there is no need to imagine the actual situation of things.

Despite this, I still advocate that middle school textbooks should select a few fu-style articles from the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties. Chinese is a monosyllabic language (it was polysyllabic at first, but that was a long time ago), and it has lost most of its consonant endings, making it abrupt and hard. If you want an article to flow smoothly, you have to work harder on the sound. In the Sui Dynasty, an official named Li Xie wrote a letter to the emperor asking for a ban on the flamboyant style of writing, criticizing the Qi and Liang dynasties for "the endless writing, which is not like the shape of the moon and dew, and the piled-up cases are like the shape of wind and clouds." He was right, but these two sentences of his are parallel prose. It seems that some characteristics of Chinese itself have an impact on the style of writing that is not easy to resist. Why do children call hats "maomao" and socks "socks socks", why are there so many heavy words in the Book of Songs, and why do Chinese disyllabic words overwhelm monosyllabic words in use? Our language needs a lot of redundancy to sound good and be written beautifully. There is nothing we can do about it.

Although the ancient pronunciation has changed a lot since then, the Six Dynasties Fu is still the best training to help us deal with the sound and color of Chinese and feel the beauty of form. The classical Chinese reading in middle school Chinese is naturally not to teach students to write classical Chinese, nor is it just to tell students which are "good articles". Another important thing is to cultivate a sense of language and accumulate language materials. In recent years, Chinese has been ground and ground by violent coarse sand, and then turned into a fast food box, which is used and discarded. I dare not say that Chinese is degenerating, but our sense of language is indeed degenerating in the past two or three generations. At this time, reading a little Six Dynasties text, although it is too beautiful and too rich, may have another kind of corrective effect. Moreover, the exposition of Fu-style articles is not all nonsense. It is necessary to stay in front of the object for a while to explore the sound and appearance, rather than just taking a glance and immediately claiming "I know it". Cao Zijian's "Linguan Fu" says, "There is no way to serve the public, no way to hide for private interests; no scales to swim and escape, no wings to fly." Such sentences may help us to express fully, and behind the full expression is the calm processing of materials in the mind. Whether describing or thinking about something, haste is not necessarily smart, even in the Internet age.

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Adrian Lu said: "At the end of the Tang Dynasty, poetry declined, but essays shone brightly. However, Luo Yin's "Slanderous Book" is almost entirely about resistance and indignation. Pi Rixiu and Lu Guimeng considered themselves hermits, and others also called them hermits, but looking at their essays in "Pi Zi Wen Shu" and "Li Ze Cong Shu", they did not forget the world. It is the brilliance and edge in the muddy pond."