It is already ten o'clock in the morning. The autumn sun poured down from behind the curtains. It is broad daylight outside. People are spending the day. I am well aware of this. However, I was still lethargic in bed.
I still have a lot of work to do. It may not be completed even now. I know this better. However, it was this thought that kept me on the bed, unable to move at all. The thought suffocated me.
However, it also gives me safety and comfort. I stretched out under the quilt and my skin felt cool and soft. It's such a pleasant and gentle village.
This is probably slave status. At the same time, we feel the burden of stress, and at the same time enjoy safety and comfort in the absence of thought. Even if you are forced to act, you only need to do the "work" under the drive of the whip.
"Work", what a legitimate word.
But the teacher told me that the Latin word for "work" is a kind of "torture instrument". Matching "work" is "weekend". No wonder the old countess in "Downton Abbey" asked, in dismay and naivety, "What...what is a weekend?
" "It is a label of identity, a solid and unbreakable brand of class. Perhaps, in modern society, they have softened into a person's mental state, or way of life. They can stay on everyone, even on the same person.
That's exactly the story I saw in "The Bridge of Last Dreams". A seemingly old-fashioned story.
Francesca, an ordinary peasant woman in rural America, the farmer's wife, and the mother of two teenage children. The heavy work every day made her faintly feel that she was gradually moving away from the sweet dreams of her youth.
By chance, she met Robert, a photographer who came to the local scene. The two knew each other, fell in love, and spent four dream-like days together. But Francesca immediately faced a choice: wander around with Robert, or stay and continue to be a peasant woman. After a brief and painful struggle, she chose to stay.
So people commented that it showed the tension between romantic love and the burden of family. However, in my opinion, the nobility of Francesca is that she has stepped out of this binary opposition by her own strength. At the end of the film, in the pouring rain, Francesca sees Robert in the truck, asking her with controlled, eager eyes about her decision. Moments later, she had a beautiful smile full of determination and affection.
In my opinion, it is this smile that shows her transcendence and freedom. From then on, she no longer works passively, nor is she passively driven by lust, and from then on, she becomes her own master.
A new Francesca, exercising her freedom for the first time, chooses not to live a creative life in an unknown world, but to take on family responsibilities.
However, isn't this a return to the aforementioned dichotomy of romance and burden? If the responsibilities of the family revert back to the burden of the family, then Francesca has not been given a new life. Responsibility can be established for the first time only on the premise of autonomous choice. Correspondingly, for an individual without freedom, any external requirements may become a burden, driving her and enslaving her.
Such stress and servitude are living experiences, as I felt the weight of my bed in the morning. Under the heavy burden, there is almost no possibility of creation. In the responsibility, there is often a new life. The extent to which burdens recede, responsibility arises, and creativity burst forth may depend on the extent to which we can create freedom.
And the burden of that deeper freedom is probably something that only a truly free person can enjoy. I don't know how much Francesca has experienced.
When living in Beijing in October 2014
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