When did you feel you were no longer young?

When did you realize that you were no longer a young man?

The post-90s generation in my circle of friends watched a song from Station B. I asked my colleagues in the company, and they looked at me, an old man, with disgust: Mao is not easy!

I remembered that someone posted on WeChat Moments yesterday: "I didn't expect that the reading volume of this issue about Chow Yun-fat was a record low." Another friend replied: "The reading volume of our writing about Stephen Chow is also average. Nowadays, the post-90s, Those born in the 2000s don’t really know how awesome they are.”

I was a little unconvinced and clicked on the MV called “Into the Sea”. Youth, graduation season, full screen of sorrow and youthful questioning suddenly hit me. Time went back: the day I left school, I took the school bus to the train station and looked out the window at the classmates running behind me. They cried faster than me, which seemed a bit dark... It took me a few years to realize that, It is so difficult to have such a collapse. Most of the collapses of adults are silent, and there are no more tears.

bilibili That year, I was still in "Southern Sports". Because the Shanghai Sharks Club did not want Yao Ming to go to the NBA, they proposed a compensation of 30 million US dollars to him. At that time, Yao Ming's annual salary in the CBA was only 700,000 yuan.

Memory is like the headlights of a car, suddenly illuminating his expression at that time: (for such a tall man) he seems to have forehead wrinkles on his face. He has never looked younger, but At that moment he was a sad young man.

From time to time, I catch a glimpse of Yao Ming on TV. He is like a huge statue standing on the National Mall. It is difficult for people not to notice him. But I am often surprised, as if the person I met at the beginning is not the same person.

Yao Ming, Kobe Bryant, Jay Chou... Actually looking back, if you want to record those fading names, many things will be different.

Including myself, who among our generation has not been crushed by the wheels of the times?

2

The classmate of our university once recalled: "I remember that you always wore clothes so dark that you couldn't see anyone (actually because you were fat), holding a baby in your arms. Stacking books, hunching his back, his hair hanging down so much that he couldn’t see his face, he walked like a fat shadow on the way to the library. "

My favorite writer Paul Auster is in "The Palace of the Moon" and "Moon Palace". There is a similar description in "The Book of Phantoms": When life is on the verge of despair, the protagonist either exiles himself to destruction like a beggar, or gets involved in extravagant promiscuity - running rampant in this absurd world, using physical madness Self-retaliation and a so-called pleasure of disillusionment.

Maybe this is a kind of youthful ignorance.

I ate a lot at that time. I often did not go to the classroom to study at night. Instead, I chose to sit in the dormitory, light a candle, and immerse myself in endless gluttony. My body was my cage. , it seems that only through such imprisonment, can there be a vague feeling of being "safe" in life.

I also wanted to find someone to love. One night, I plucked up the courage and took a letter to go to a senior student in the school. It seemed that he was the most qualified person in this school. The one who accepted my confession.

What did he say? What did I say again? Everyone seems to be a little vague and unclear. It wasn't until the second week after that day that he paired up with a girl from another class in our grade in the cafeteria, breaking his excuse of not looking for classmates, that I realized something later.

What can you understand? That year, "Chongqing Evening News" published countless recruitment advertisements. To me, love was just a short-lived luxury trick. I drew lines in the newspaper every day. Today I felt that I was suitable to be an administrative clerk, and tomorrow I felt that I was suitable to be a manager. Assistant, I feel that I am suitable for insurance the day after tomorrow...

I went to Jiefangbei, Qixinggang, and Shapingba again and again. My classmates in the dormitory said with a smile: "Are you applying for a professional account now?"

I asked them to join me, but they were rejected every time - they all have Chongqing household registration, Chongqing parents or Chongqing connections, and they have long been prepared to become civil servants or work for foreign companies.

One day I was walking on the road with a gloomy face. The director of the school’s graduates stopped me and smiled and said to me, introduce a job to me - the most favored student in my grade before that. She recommended me to work as a translator at the city's Foreign Affairs Office. I think I was just dumbfounded at that time.

On the day I went for the interview, I found out that it was a cruise ship and the job she recommended to me was that of a waiter.

The summer was very hot. I stood in front of the teaching building. The classmates upstairs cheered for the offers they had received. They were probably from big companies. One cheer was too high-pitched, like a bullet. Whistling past my head.

In this dazzling sunshine, I feel like a complete waste.

3

Last night, I dreamed again that I could clearly see the lamp that Fitzgerald wrote about in "The Great Gatsby" at an altitude of 10,000 meters. Distant green light ("He stretched out his arms toward the dark water. It was so weird that way. Even though I was far away from him, I could have sworn he was shaking. I couldn't help but look out to sea - everything. I can't tell, except for a green light, small and far away, maybe the end of a pier...") The adjustable windows of the new Boeing model show that there are no clouds blocking the view, and everything on the earth seems to be clear at a glance .

In the noisy 1920s in the United States, the poor boy Fitzgerald became a veritable "golden boy." He created the myth of true pennies - one of his short stories was worth four thousand dollars. At that time, a few hundred dollars was enough to own a good car. T.S. Eliot, who has always been reserved and steady, even asserted after reading "The Great Gatsby" that Fitzgerald's novel is "the first step forward in American novels since Henry James." . At that time, he and his wife kept their suitcases open every day. They traveled to wealthy cocktail parties in Europe and the United States, and became the spokesmen and idols of the young people of that era.

Fitzgerald and Zelda, 1920 Source: Princeton University Library

In 1929, the United States and the world fell into the Great Depression, which belonged to Fitzgerald The golden age of virtue also passed quietly. His novel "Tender Is the Night" published in 1934 was met with a cold reception. Alcoholism became the writer's only way to escape life and squandered his remaining talent. His bad habit of frequently being late on manuscripts and his unfashionable style caused magazines and newspapers to successively stop requesting manuscripts from him. Fitzgerald never became rich again. Neither "The Great Gatsby" nor his last novel, "Tender Is the Night," became bestsellers.

Not every young person has experienced casual success, but every young person has more or less experienced the friction of having his face pressed to the ground. Fitzgerald's line in "The Great Gatsby" "We rowed hard, fought hard against the waves, only to be washed back to our past" - I only think this is because of his greatness as a writer starting point.