But why are we alive? This is an unsolved problem, just like the ultimate question of mankind, "who am I?" Where did it come from? Where to go? " Similarly, most people may never find the answer.
It has nothing to do with your position, power or status.
Yu Hua said in the preface to "Living": "People live for living itself, not for anything other than living." This sentence is true, but it does not apply to us. This sentence is more of a philosophical thought. To interpret life and destiny objectively, there is no hope, no despair, just living.
However, this is not our life. Our life should be walking between ravines, with an abyss at our feet and a clear sky rising. The most important thing is the gully under our feet, perhaps someone, something, an ideal, a persistence, a god; It is because of their existence that we are alive and hopeful, and we will not collapse in loneliness and give up in suffering.
It would be cruel to live just to live, so what if you can live forever? There are no relatives, no one, and no gaps in my heart. How long can such immortality last?
Like The Fantasy Drifting of Pi, the storm and the sinking of the cargo ship made Pi, mother, chef and sailor become the survivors of the lifeboat, and food soon fell short of demand. The sailor's leg is broken. After the amputation, the chef used the broken leg of the water hand as bait to fish. Soon, the sailor died, and the chef dismembered the sailor and dried it as bait and direct food. Later, my mother had an argument with the chef, and my mother was killed by the chef. Later, the angry pie killed the chef, dismembered him and dried him, and survived by eating his meat. After eating the chef's meat, Pai continued to eat her mother's body and maggots on it until she was rescued.
Perhaps out of fear or instinct, the Sect chose to live between life and death. Pies crossed moral taboos, ate each other and even ate their mothers. We can't understand his psychology at that time, but there is no doubt that it was desperate to the point of collapse.
In the process of drifting, Pai met another storm. He shouted to God, My family is dead, and I gave you everything. Why are you doing this to me? From the initial devout believers to the despair of God, and then to the fantasy stories told after being rescued, they chose to regain their faith; Faith, humanity and animality are not discussed here.
Pai survived because of his faith and a gap in his heart; Is this gully driven by human instinct, or perhaps it is because of the persistence of faith. Only when there is obsession and persistence in people's hearts can we see hope in suffering and live with our heads held high, instead of simply living for the sake of living.
Yu Hua described the cruelest things in life with plain brushwork in Living, and revealed a cruel truth after removing what we thought was important. People are born to be human, and they are lonely until they die. Everything else is just the background. What humans think is just a "0".
Maybe this is true, but so what? We never live to simply live. If living is meaningless, then we give it meaning. From the moment we were born, we chose life, whether by instinct or otherwise. What matters is our choice and persistence.
I hope you all remember your dreams when you were young, remember the direction when you set sail, and wish you come back from Qian Fan, even if you are white-haired, you are still that teenager.