The first time I read it, I read it eagerly and quickly, and my concentration seemed to make up for the blind spot of understanding. I just want to search for those unknown blind spots and even leap-forward exploration in those familiar scenic spots. It took me two days to see them. The author seems to be a knowledgeable tour guide, leading the readers to visit Hangzhou again and travel through time and space again.
The book combines poetic narration with many historical pictures, which is easy to understand and full of rich historical and humanistic atmosphere, but also contains a faint literary atmosphere. This book is different from ordinary urban culture books, and it goes beyond the imagination of ordinary urban history biographies. This is my favorite narrative style.
The author said: There are many souls walking in every city, some are visible and some are invisible. They appear at different times, overlapping in the same space, layer after layer, some can be perceived, and some are ignorant all their lives. And "Hangzhou on Earth" is about souls who can be perceived when they travel to and from Hangzhou at different times.
The book consists of 25 chapters, from the birth of Liangzhu civilization 5,000 years ago, "Hang": Dayu crossing the river, to the "endless chaos" canal bringing wealth; From naive and upright Bai Juyi to Bai Causeway, and then to Su Dongpo who claimed to be from Hangzhou in his previous life, he wrote more than 450 poems for Hangzhou and West Lake. From being the capital for the first time, there is a fate of not competing with the king of the Central Plains, to being "Lin 'an" for a while, and being safe all his life; From the night Hu Xueyan lost, to the revival of outstanding performers represented by Zong and Feng Gensheng in 1990s, and then to the surging "city that never sleeps" under the development of digital economy.
These souls that haunt in different historical periods are only branded on the surface of the city. The record of these souls in the book allows readers to appreciate the multi-time, multi-dimensional and diversified Hangzhou city.
Regarding the description of the city, I like the author's sentence very much: "Any city exists in time rather than space, and time is meaningless. It can present different narrative values only because of the existence of the soul." Indeed, it is after years of precipitation that the city has accumulated such rich cultural heritage that the Hangzhou city described by the author has come into being.
As an author who has lived in Hang Cheng for more than forty years, it is the city that has shaped him and given him the opportunity to narrate. And he regards it as an idea, and he also hopes that readers will regard it as a person's private memory of the city. The presentation of every historical fragment in the author's works and the description of every character who appeared everywhere reveal his views, attitudes, preferences and emotions, and from time to time reveal the eccentric character of Hangzhou people without the characteristics of rejection.
When I saw the last chapter "Conclusion: A City Only Related to Living", I suddenly stopped reading, and found that reading the history of a city really seemed to give people another sense of time. You can recall the past or look forward to the future from any passage. It seems to be intermittent, complex and simple, irreversible and full of imagination. It makes the fragile body suddenly glow, thus surpassing all living things on this planet.
These are my first impressions of the book Hangzhou on Earth: My Memory of the City. In the near future, when I step into Hangzhou again and touch Hang Cheng, these shallow feelings will be more real!