He wrote countless Internet golden sentences, but he never really became popular

This article is reproduced with permission from the Hardcore Reading Club

Original title | What kills a book may be its golden sentence

Author: Seibu

Editor | Zhang Wenxi

Proofreading | Yang Chao

"Bookstore" stills.

In the hurried modern society, it has become a luxury to settle down and spend a full time reading classic literature.

Modern people do not necessarily have the full time and energy to read the original works of classic literature. At this time, the excerpted literary golden sentences are like a delicious literary snack, which has become people's favorite. The works of Zweig, Borges, Pessoa and others have also become the most widely disseminated and collected literature on social sharing platforms.

People find emotional resonance in these golden sentences, and the golden sentence literature wanders around the Internet in fragments, and its popularity even gives people the illusion that it can revive classic literature. Perhaps, through the tip of the iceberg revealed by the golden sentence literature, people can also enjoy some comfort brought by words.

Borges probably did not expect that he could become so popular in the 21st century.

Searching for the Argentine writer on social sharing platforms, you can find more than 10,000 notes, many of which are popular posts with tens of thousands of likes. This situation is also true on short video platforms. Netizens share the golden lines in his novels and poems one after another, such as "Your absence is like a helpless stone tablet, which will make many dusks dim" in "The Passion of Buenos Aires". ".

Screenshot of social sharing platform.

These sentences, paired with a few gray, messy paintings, or pleasing landscapes, can garner thousands of likes, a new traffic password. People also gave Borges's writing style a new title - "bereavement romance."

Overnight, Borges became the new slogan writer on social networks, still top-notch. Before that, the only golden sentence he was widely praised was the sentence "Heaven is what a library looks like".

This should not be surprising. Becoming a writer of golden sentences seems to be the fate of great writers.

The golden sentences in the works of Stephen Zweig, Pablo Neruda, Zhang Ailing and others have been selected for a long time, and combined with pictures, videos and other media, they are scattered all over the social network in the form of popular golden sentence literature.

Everything was like a Russian turntable, only this time it was Borges' turn.

01

golden sentence literature,

Let the writers take turns

Borges is not the first person to become popular on social networks with a golden sentence, nor will he be the last person.

"All the gifts of fate have already marked their prices in secret." This ancient literary golden sentence comes from "The Beheaded Queen" written by the Austrian writer Stephen Zweig. When writing about the tortuous life of Marie Antoinette, the queen of King Louis XVI of France, Zweig used this dictum-like remark to make a sympathetic footnote for her guillotine ending.

When the Stars of Humanity Shine: Fourteen Historical Features

[O] Stephen Zweig, translated by Jiang Yi

Fruit and Mai Culture | Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2019-7

Because of its allegorical and vigilant colors, this popular saying has been widely circulated on social networks. When people want to express the sigh of the impermanence of fate, they do it at their fingertips.

Zweig is probably the best of the golden sentence writers. Books such as "Letter from a Strange Woman" and "Yesterday's World: Memories of a European" have contributed a large number of golden sentences for all beings to chew on.

Also not absent from the signature file and social dynamics, there is Pablo Neruda.

The Chilean poet is known for his love poems, and his masterpiece "Twenty Love Poems and Songs of Despair" can be called the "Bible" of love poems, making Neruda a wholesaler of golden sentences. On social platforms, this collection of poems is often a book recommended by reading bloggers and netizens. With sentences such as "You are the last rose in my wasteland", it spreads the romance from Neruda.

"Twenty Love Poems and Songs of Despair"

[Chile] Pablo Neruda, translated by Chen Li and Zhang Fenling

New Classic Culture | Nanhai Publishing Company, 2014-6

Although some of these Amway have some slightly exaggerated recommendations such as "I'm blushing" and "must read for girls", these golden sentences have really brought Neruda's popularity to a higher level.

"Twenty Love Poems and Songs of Despair" has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, twice that of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and its Chinese version also appeared on Douban's Top 50 Most Popular Foreign Poems list, ranking 24th bit.

In addition to them, the famous sentence writer who has become popular on social networks this summer is the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. This new top literary star has successfully become popular with the heart-piercing sentences in the essay collection "Frightened Lu" and the poetry collection "I Carry the Universe With You".

It can be read from the titles of "I Am Nothing" and "One Man's Group", Pessoa has exhausted his viewing and exploration of his own life and spiritual world in "The Record of Disturbance". And the sentences he wrote, "I am the outskirts of a town that never existed, the lengthy preface to a book that has never been written," naturally captured the hearts of a large number of people with its romantic and lonely colors.

"The Anxiety Record"

[Portuguese] Fernando Pessoa, translated by Han Shaogong

Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2019-7

There is also the phrase "I carry the universe with me", which is no less popular than Borges's phrase "Heaven is like a library", which directly sent Pessoa to the Hall of Fame of Golden Sentence Literature.

Before that, Pessoa was remembered by the literary youth for the praise of the famous literary critic Harold Bloom: "He even surpassed all the works of Borges in fantasy creation." At that time, people's admiration for Pessoa was just a small carnival.

The golden sentence literature has always been growing one after another, and is always holding a new "lucky".

02

True literary or pseudo literary youth,

A debate that never stops

When it was most out of the circle, the golden sentence literature also triggered a war without the smoke of gunpowder on the Internet.

At the end of 2018, when the casting of the film of the same name adapted from Eileen Chang's novel "The First Incense" was announced, the actor Ma Sichun, who played the heroine Ge Weilong, was caught in the whirlpool of public opinion. In addition to being ridiculed that she did not match the character image of the novel, she was also picked up to say that "golden sentences" did not exist in Zhang Ailing's novels.

Ma Sichun plays Ge Weilong, Peng Yuyan plays Qiao Qiqiao. / "The First Incense" stills

In 2015, on the 20th anniversary of Zhang Ailing's death, Ma Sichun commemorated on Weibo: "You ask me if it is worth it to love you. In fact, you should know that love does not ask whether it is worth it." The reason why this golden sentence does not exist , because there is no such sentence in Eileen Chang's novels.

The public mistakenly thought that it appeared in "Half Life", but it was not. The fact is that Zhang Ailing used the second half of the sentence in the frontispiece of "The Story of Lost Ran" to express her love for "Lust, Caution":

"This little story once shocked me, so I was willing to revise it over and over again for many years. In the process of rewriting, I didn't realize that 30 years later, love is not worth it."

There is also a popular saying for such half-truths as Ma Sichun quoted, called "false quotations". Although they do not really and completely exist in the works of writers, on social networks, false quotations have assumed the same functions and roles as golden sentences, and are included in the generalized golden sentence literature.

Celebrities pretend to be literary and artistic with fake quotes, like dropping a bomb on the public opinion field.

Whether it is a so-called reading blogger, or someone who just takes the golden sentence as a signature file and sends it to the circle of friends, once they show their preference for the golden sentence literature, they are often despised by young literary and artistic people who do not understand literature and only love it. Use these flower fists and embroidered legs to decorate yourself and pretend to be literary.

They are always criticized as "pseudo-literate youth", and they are tacitly disliked to read the original works, and they only remember these widely circulated sentences.

If you don't see it, it's not Wen Qing. How exactly is Wen Qing defined? /webpage Screenshot

Sometimes, these golden sentence literature lovers will also be unconvinced, and after being attracted by the golden sentence, they go to the original works of the writers and try to read more content.

But not as easy to understand as the golden sentences separated from the complex context, the whole picture of these literary works is often larger and deeper, which seems obscure and esoteric in their eyes, and finally they have to retreat and return to the comfort of golden sentence literature. area.

A still from "Fighting Dragon".

Just like after Borges became popular on social networks, some people were attracted by the poem "I give you the sorrow of a man who has been looking at the lonely moon for a long time", and they read his masterpiece " The Garden of Forking Paths", but was confused by the mysticism in it, so he had to close the book and return home.

Even when some book bloggers introduce Pessoa, they will emphasize that it is difficult for him to enter his writing world at first, and instead introduce the vague appearance of those golden sentences. They complained that "The Record of Anxiety" was too trivial and repetitive, which made people lose their patience to continue reading.

Those who are fed by the golden sentence literature stop at the gate of the literary world.

03

Contemporary migrant workers need golden sentence literature

In the last century, the French literary critic Roland Barthes shouted the famous slogan "The author is dead", pointing to the decentralization of the author in modern times. "In the end, there is no more function than the function of the sign itself, which is repeated over and over again, and this disconnect occurs: the sound loses its source, the author dies, and the writing begins."

In this context, the golden sentence literature that wanders around the Internet in fragments is undoubtedly the evidence that the "author is dead" in this era. When the writers become a symbolic image, hidden behind the golden sentence, they are unconsciously invisible.

"Little Women" photo.

The popularity of golden sentence literature has always caused some people to have an illusion: in the era of fragmentation, pure literature has ushered in a revival, which is enough to resist the occasional argument that "literature is dead".

However, rather than let the golden sentence literature undertake such a huge task, it is better to say that the golden sentence literature is a new manifestation of serious literature in the fragmented era.

The complex emotions and truths conveyed in the novels, poems and other writings of writers reveal the tip of the iceberg in the golden sentence, and it is this tip that makes those touched by it find a kind of comfort, and then use it to express or decorate own heart.

After all, an emotional, complete speech is always more connotative than the simple word "emo."

The popularity of golden sentence literature is also because it hits the collective mood and crux of this era.

"Anxiety Records" has become a "book of social animals" in the mouths of some people. Readers perceive the same exhaustion and unfreedom in the life described by Pessoa, an accountant.

Stills of "Love Like a Bouquet".

In "Autism", he wrote: "What I am looking for is a deep sleep, a quench, a trivial resignation. For me, the walls of the shabby house are both a prison and a distant horizon, both a bed and a coffin."

This is exactly the portrayal of the plight of modern urbanites. In the accelerated atomization society, migrant workers are huddled in their own lives, with no intention of connecting more with others and society. They found resonance in Pessoa's writing, which was a slightly bitter consolation.

And the popular Borges poems on the Internet, dubbed the ceiling of "bereavement romance", actually once again exposed the problem of "love incompetence" in our era.

In reality, young people hold high the banner of "don't fall in love, just want to make money", and the craze for singleness continues. The book "Single Society" written by American sociology professor Eric Crinenberg is a portrayal. Also a fable.

"Single Society"

[US] Written by Cranenberg, translated by Shen Kaixi

99 Readers | Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2015-2

Young people who have lost their desire to love turn their heads to find romance on paper in the golden sentence literature. The widely circulated "What Can I Use to Keep You", after reading the deep feelings in it, people are caught in the beautiful imagery of "the thin street, the desperate sunset, the moon in the deserted suburbs" in the poem. Become the one who looks at the lonely moon.

In this way, the golden sentence literature has become the spiritual adjustment of modern people. Just as the retro trend has swept the popular entertainment life this year, people who have the same crux of the times, after looking for sweetness in Wang Xinling's sweetness, turn their heads to look for another kind of bitterness in the golden sentence literature, adding a little more perception to life. comprehend.

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