Almighty painter

Chapter 704: Echoes of the Mountains
When I was in college, there was a mini-semester that lasted a full month and a half. In the comparative reading class, they spent the time reading a variety of reading materials.

Tolstoy, Woolf, Joseph Pound, Nabokov, Kawabata... Oh, and the mysterious writer Elena Ferrante, whose identity was still a hot topic of discussion in academia at the time.

The whole process is like breaking these names into pieces, and then using wool and crochet to weave them all into a colorful sweater bit by bit.

One month's time.

It is certainly impossible to read all the books by these people, or even perhaps any one work under any one of their names.

This amount of time is far from enough.

“Reading will accompany you throughout your life. Even if there is only one amphora on the table, it took the Russians a century to fill it. It may take another century for people to lift it and pour out the Baikal inside. Even that small milk can can feed everyone in the whole classroom.”

That class is taught in English.

The professor giving the lecture was a fat Russian aunt.

"Well, if you are smiling like Anna right now, it means you have already read the reading materials I left before class. That's good."

"If you are secretly staring at Miss Elena's profile right now." The professor smiled and knocked on the desk of a guy in a jacket in the front row, "Then I can only say, Work Hard. Every year, there are always people who fail this class."

This time.

Many people in the classroom laughed.

Anna lowered her head and calmly opened the handouts that the teacher had distributed before class.

Russian literature is known for its brevity and conciseness. The works of the most brilliant names in the history of Russian literature, such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Turgenev..., if added up, would total about 23,000 pages if calculated according to the most common printing format in Europe. In terms of time, that's about a hundred years.

Such concentration is completely unimaginable for works in English, French, or German.

Even for Americans, whose country has existed for only a little over two centuries, it is difficult to compress their literary works into 20,000 pages.

What the professor just quoted was the preface from the critic Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature, which the professor printed on the last page of the reading material list left before class.

Nabokov believed that, apart from one medieval work, the essence of Russian literature could be fully captured in a small "amphora" with a capacity of a century, and the remaining accessories, at most, would be a small milk jug.

If Russian literature is the most condensed and concise literary genre among all the mainstream literatures in the world that has been passed down to this day.

Then.

Of all the artists of the 19th century, Carra is probably the painter whose paintings have survived to this day with the most condensed and concise works.

Some collections of letters, a diary, and a fragment of a burnt canvas - this is all that is left of Kara's life in the world.

The long golden-red hair curled in the ashes was a collection of all her life's works.

It doesn't get much simpler than this.

You don't even need a porcelain vase.

A small box for the ring will do.

"Oh... If there is something else, then... it is the painting she hid at 'The End of the World'."

Anna thought to herself.

Unfortunately, perhaps it will stay at the end of the world forever, as if floating in the universe, neither rising nor falling, and no one will ever know.

No trace left.

"Everything we do in class this semester is about mixing cocktails - correct operation, correct recipe, correct cup, high-quality materials and beautiful decoration. A little Russian vodka, a little pineapple juice from Hawaii, a slice of lemon from Asia, blue orange or mint leaves, and finally served in a cup made in Austria."

Even when it comes to rhetoric in the classroom, the professor still has the strong passion for alcohol that is unique to the Slavic people.

"If everything is right, we will use this wine, even if it's just a little bit, to make ourselves dizzy and try to figure out how words work, what kind of metaphors are effective, and what kind of metaphors are invalid..."

The professor's voice echoed in my ears.

Anna casually flipped through the class notes in her hands.

The question of how words work is like asking what a perpetual motion machine looks like.

Naturally profound.

Naturally charming.

Countless people have given their guesses, but no one has been able to find the answer.

Some people think that novels are a collection of some kind of politics, history, and morality, and that all styles are a trick. In the end, novels will be highly restored like realistic works of art, or they will be completely refined into something like news records or scientific investigation reports.

There are also some formalists who believe that "what the novel is about" is not important at all. The key is style. Style is above all else. Style makes the work timeless, while content is merely a carrier of style, just like a portrait on canvas is merely a carrier of brushstrokes.

The height, weight, and size of the portrait itself are not worth mentioning at all; what matters is that the brushstrokes are exquisite enough.

This form resembles some kind of abstract painting, and in the end only the misty brushstrokes are left floating across the misty painting.

In literary works, its ultimate is probably a product similar to Flaubert's ultimate dream -

Flaubert dreamed all his life of completing a book like that, one without any real substance, all held together by an aesthetic style.

More than a hundred years ago, the academic community has completely proved that perpetual motion machines do not exist and are completely impossible to exist.

It is the ultimate dream that physicists cannot achieve.

Maybe.

Miss Elena feels that one day, writers may discover that the proposition of "how words touch people's hearts" will also be the ultimate question that they cannot figure out.

Just like, Anna was casually flipping through a reading material on the handout at this moment.

It was a small chapter in the representative work of a well-known scholar, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for this work and was extremely famous internationally.

It doesn’t matter whether you have won a literary award or not.

Even among the award-winning works, there are many that are difficult to understand and obscure, or in other words, such works even dominate the mainstream.

They may all be works of sufficient literary value.

But according to Miss Elena's aesthetic standards, they are not very literary. They are not the kind of works that can make a person feel gentle and peaceful on a warm afternoon when he is dizzy.

in other words.

You have to try your best to read those articles. If you are not careful, even if you are gentle and calm, you will still be confused by them.

Of course, the literary quality of words is not limited to the expression of "gentleness and tranquility".

As.

The "beauty" of a work of art can certainly not be expressed only as "beauty".

But there was a long period of time.

Whenever Anna thought of Grandma Kara because of one thing or another, she would become depressed and melancholy.

At such times.

Whether she was looking at paintings or reading books, she wanted to see something simpler and more relaxing.

The passage on the lecture notes in front of me tells the story of a young girl wandering in an empty old garden. She sees the big maple tree in the courtyard and the mottled old sculptures beside the tree. She then thinks of the insects she raises in a pot. Finally, she thinks of the ancient Chinese myth of the "World in a Pot".

It is hard to say that these contents have any profound literary meaning, and they are not even connected to each other.

The author just said mysteriously at the end, "Things are not unrelated."

unconsciously.

Anna was attracted by the author's words.

The other party's writing has a strong aesthetic tendency. It looks like an impressionist oil painting, full of light and shadow, but with a subjective clarity, like a cool spring breeze.

Even if it has been translated into English.

It is also effortless to read.

The author wrote about many scenes, as densely as a travel guide, the courtyard, the girl in the courtyard, the old tree in the courtyard, the thick trunk, the moss on the tree, the old and rough bark, and the sculptures, and the origin of the sculptures...

They were written one after another, and in Anna's mind, like an oil painter's brush, they painted the appearance of a courtyard in an ancient capital.

then.

Suddenly, the other party changed his tone and said that every spring, one or two small purple flowers would bloom at a certain node of the big maple tree in the courtyard.

The petals are very small.

It was only as big as a girl's fingernail, tiny and lonely.

These flowers are the most common varieties in the ancient capital, and they are not conspicuous when they bloom. Tourists who occasionally come to the courtyard will be attracted by the big maple tree with branches and leaves covering the whole courtyard, or by the sculptures and stone carvings in the yard.

Those little flowers bloom here.

It drives very hard, but no one will ever know.

This is actually a very sad and empty story, a tinge of sadness, the sorrow of things that combine sadness with beauty.

but.

The author did not express any sad lamentations.

He simply wrote a sentence, "The butterfly flew among the flowers and leaves, leaving a faint shadow behind."

“But butterflies are sentient,” he wrote.

"But the butterfly is aware."

The girl muttered to herself.

In an instant.

Her fingers paused as she flipped through the handouts.

"——Some things in the world are not visible to the eyes. It is us rather than God who is watching Macbeth. Cooking with heart, this is what Henry James believed to be the secret of writing——"

The Russian aunt at the podium was still explaining something in her thick rolled tongue accent.

But Miss Elena had turned a deaf ear to it.

"But the butterfly is aware."

Only these few simple words echoed in her mind, like a fluttering butterfly flying across her chest, leaving a sparse and light shadow in her memories of the Menech Monastery in her youth.

At that moment, the classroom was completely silent.

Just like when I was young, there was complete silence in front of Grandma Karazu's tombstone.

Just like at this moment, there is complete silence in the VIP lounge at Singapore Changi International Airport.

No human voice is heard.

No noise.

There was only one sound echoing in her ears, like the flapping of a butterfly's wings, vibrating the eardrum in Anna's ear.

She finally understood what it was that morning in her youth that warmed her, enlightened her, and embraced her in the void.

That is not God's guidance.

That is just the projection of the soul in the world.

"But the butterfly is aware."

If someone has the courage to step out of her bubble, if she does something meaningful between playing the role of a drunken princess on the stage and embracing the world freely.

Then.

Somewhere in the world, a flower should bloom.

Maybe it is an insignificant little flower, maybe it is a little flower that no one cares about, maybe it is a little flower that is both insignificant and no one cares about.

One spring after another.

Countless people have passed by it, turning a blind eye to it, deaf ears to it, and smelling it without noticing its fragrance.

Maybe.

All that was left of her life was a strand of burnt curly hair on the canvas.

……

however.

Butterflies are sentient.

Everywhere in the world, at a certain moment in time, there will always be a pale pink butterfly that uses its wings to leave a projection of life on the flowers.

however.

Butterflies are sentient.

Kara died just like that, without miracles, without God, and even without any dignity, leaving nothing behind.

But something still remained.

For example, the concluding words printed in the Oil Painting magazine: "A noble soul cannot be bound, she will find freedom on her own."

For example, those letters and the burnt corner of the drawing paper.

They may never be known to the world, and may no longer have any aesthetic value, but it... still inspires Anna.

One hundred and fifty years later, she was still hugging another Miss Elena who lived in the huge manor.

For example, the painting that Kara hid at the end of the world.

They may never be discovered by the world, and may never be added to the family treasure room.

But it must still be somewhere in the world.

Opening silently.

Attracting a butterfly that happens to fly by.

This is the meaning of life.

Nothing is irrelevant.

They are all butterflies.

Miss Anna will always pursue that painting and search for the corner at the end of the world.

She flapped her wings and took off.

She didn't know where the little flower on her ancient capital, ancient garden and ancient tree would bloom, but Anna knew that the little flower was blooming somewhere in the world.

because--

Butterflies are sentient.

Anna originally thought that this would be a lifelong search, a lifelong pursuit.

but now.

Just a few years later.

The journal appeared in her possession shortly after her 22nd birthday.

There were small lavender flowers blooming at her fingertips.

The butterflies flapped their wings one hundred and fifty years ago, the butterflies flapped their wings in front of the monastery tombstone at my aunt's funeral, and the butterflies flapped their wings between the handouts in the classroom during my college years.

finally.

They overlapped and stayed together at this moment, on Anna's fingertips.

The butterfly flaps its wings.

It seems as if the mountains are echoing.

(End of this chapter)