Speaking of "The Old Man and the Sea", students in later generations must be familiar with it, because excerpts from this book have appeared in middle school Chinese textbooks. (I can't remember what grade it is, but it was more than ten years ago.) ）

And what impressed Zhuang Yan the most in this book was actually only one sentence - people can be destroyed, but they cannot be defeated.

This sentence can be said to be the main theme of the book, the old Cuban fisherman, who had not caught a fish for 84 consecutive days, finally took the bait on the 85th day with a large fish of more than 1,500 pounds.

After three days and three nights of fighting, the old man finally subdued this big fish he had never seen before. But the test of the sea was not over, and the smell of blood attracted the sharks in the vicinity, and the old man had to fight again with these attracted big fish.

At the end of the story, the old man fails, he loses the big fish he caught after days and nights, and only gets an empty skeleton.

In the past, when Zhuang Yan read this book, he regretted the old man's ultimate failure, and he didn't understand why the author arranged such a failure for the old man, shattering the perfect and touching personal heroism he had depicted before.

"Man conquers the sky" suddenly becomes "the plan is in the man, and the success is in the sky", the old fisherman's hard struggle in the sea is all in vain, and the book seems to have become a tragic song of the hero's twilight because of this ending.

But when Zhuang Yan grew up, he had some other different opinions.

Did the old fisherman really fail? No, he lost the big fish he was lucky enough to catch, and he was a failure?

No, certainly not, these physical defeats reflect the spiritual triumph of the old fisherman. As he himself said, man can be destroyed, but not defeated.

In the sea, he was alone, with wisdom and courage, bravely fought in an extremely difficult environment, never thought of giving up, he lost the big fish, but preserved the dignity of the soul, and showed people how far a person can go.

Thinking back to the content of this book, Zhuang Yan sighed deeply, he looked back at the old man who was sitting on the small boat and was looking into the distance, the old man's eyes could not see what he was thinking at the moment. According to the development of the story, this point in time should be the day when he experienced more than 80 days of returning from the sky.

He was probably disappointed, but at the same time worried about the future, after all, after such a long period of no harvest, his life had become a problem, and he would have to think about what he could eat for the next meal.

However, although the old man's eyes at this time were not resolute, there was no trace of even disappointment, or that his disappointment had long been overdrawn, and he had already expressed numbness to this current state of life?

The boat did not sail long in the sea, and the destination of the old man's trip was the port where they usually stopped.

There were many ships parked in the harbor, some very small ships like the old man, and others many times the size of his ship.

There was a boy standing on the shore, and he watched the old man's boat sail towards the shore with an expectant expression, and when the boat approached, he had already noticed that the old man had not caught a single fish like he had done in the previous eighty-three days, and the boy could not help but be a little disappointed, but then he covered up this expression, not wanting the old man to see it.

Zhuang Yan looked at the boy and knew that he should be the boy with the old man, his apprentice, and it was the old man who taught him the skills of fishing. As for the boy's name, Zhuang Yan has really forgotten.

When the old man's boat came to shore, the boy went ashore and helped the old man with the hook, the hook, the harpoon, and the sail around the mast.

The sail was patched with flour bag fragments, and when folded, it looked like a flag that marked eternal failure.

The two of them climbed ashore from the place where the boat was moored, and the child said to the old man, "Santiago, I can go to sea with you again, and my family has earned a little money." ”

Zhuang Yan knew what was going on, but the old man rejected the boy, and the old man said, "No, you have met a ship with good luck, stay with them." ”

……

The story continued to develop until the old man set sail for the eighty-fifth time, when he had just noticed that a big fish had been hooked, that the story came to an abrupt end, and Zhuang Yan woke up from his bed.

This book is not long, it is estimated that one more day, at most two days will be over, the content of last night's dream is just a foreshadowing of the story, and then he fights with big fish and sharks before the storyline really unfolds.

Zhuang Yan half-sat down and put it on, rubbed his eyes, to be honest, he was a little disappointed with last night's dream. It's not that he has any opinions about "The Old Man and the Sea", but this time it is different from the last time "The Catcher in the Rye" participated, and he has once again become a phantom, and he has also become a complete bystander.

If he had a choice, Zhuang Yan was still willing to choose the way in "The Catcher in the Rye" last time. However, the book is not a first-person perspective, and it seems a bit inappropriate to use it that way.

But even so, Zhuang Yan prefers to be attached to the characters in the book like "Alive", even if he is not the protagonist. Even if he was to possess a fish or a seagull, so that he could feel the world in the book with his body, and have some connection and interaction with the people and things in that world, he felt that it was better than now.

This book is the most famous and widely circulated book in all Zhuang Yan's dreams in the previous life. And this book has also won the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature, so it can be said that it was this book that made Hemingway go directly to the altar.

In China, because it is included in textbooks, people who are born in the 80s and 90s in the last generation basically know about this book. Even if you don't know this book, you can more or less hear the name of "The Old Man and the Sea".

If Zhuang Yan is not mistaken, there was also a singer Hemingway who sang a song in the last life, also called "The Old Man and the Sea", which was quite popular for a while, but Zhuang Yan can't remember what the melody of this song is.

And when it comes to Hemingway, Zhuang Yan immediately thought of Yu Hua, I have to say that the writing styles of these two authors are indeed very similar, and even Yu Hua himself joked: Some people say that I am very similar to Hemingway's writing style, both are very concise, I think it may be because Hemingway is the same as me, and I don't know many words.

This is purely a joke, although Yu Hua has not received the so-called "higher education", but he gave up medicine to pursue literature, and also entered the county cultural center and the Jiaxing Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and also entered the Lu Xun Academy of Literature twice for further study.

Although Hemingway refused to go to university, he became a reporter for the important "Kancheng Star" in the United States at the age of eighteen.

To say that these two people don't have enough humanities skills is definitely a big joke.