People have become accustomed to fast-paced short videos and the direct, satisfying feeling they provide.
They could hear laughter, and they could hear crying.
But we cannot hear the crisp sound of the wheels of history crushing the dust.
If you want to "soar to great heights," you need to have some weight to your name.
Lin Que opened his eyes and his gaze fell on the window.
The snow is still falling.
The snow in Jiangcheng is not as violent as in the north.
It is fine, moist, and melts upon contact with the ground.
Or they accumulate silently on the treetops, bending the branches.
The snow is falling so quietly.
A thought suddenly exploded in my mind.
He sat up straight and created a new document.
Without the slightest hesitation, he typed two words in the title bar:
Listening to the Snow.
What he wanted to write about was not the whiteness of snow, nor the joy of a good snowfall promising a bumper harvest.
He wants to borrow this snow.
Write about those profound voices buried by time, voices that are absent from this world.
Lin Que's fingers hovered over the keyboard, pausing for a moment.
It seems to be searching for the same coldness and passion that Lu Xun displayed when he wrote "Snow" in that other world.
It also seems to borrow the desolate feeling unique to the North from Chi Zijian's writing.
Finally, he typed out the first paragraph.
The snow in Jiangnan is like dead rain, like wounds that haven't had time to heal.
They fell silently, only with a damp sigh.
The cursor blinked, and the text flowed out like water.
People always talk about listening to snow, but what's so good about listening to snow?
It is neither like the crisp sound of rain pattering on banana leaves, nor like the howling of wind whistling through pine forests.
The sound of snow is the sound of oppression.
That's a weight of tens of millions of tons.
In the lightest of postures, it presses down on the rooftops, on the withered grass, and on the very eyelids of this noisy world.
It forced all things to shut up, forcing this land to return to its original desolation.
Lin Que wrote very slowly.
He didn't use any fancy words to describe the snow scene, but instead focused his writing on the land beneath the snow.
He wrote about the sound of wheat seedlings covered in snow, growing in the darkness with their teeth clenched.
He wrote about the cracked stones, the sound of them breaking in the dead of night.
In his history books, he wrote about battlefields buried under heavy snow, where the clash of swords and the thunder of horses eventually turned into a vast expanse of pure, clean, and deathly silence.
Our era is too noisy.
We laugh out loud in the background of short videos and get angry at trending topics.
Our ears are filled with all sorts of decibels, yet we can't hear this immense silence from heaven and earth.
The real thunder is often silent.
It doesn't explode in the sky; it explodes inside the seed, it explodes beneath the ice.
It exploded in the heart of everyone trying to find reality in nothingness.
...
Time passed second by second.
The snow outside the window was falling heavier and heavier, and the heating inside the house seemed to be getting a bit too hot.
Lin Que was completely immersed in that solemn yet vibrant atmosphere.
This is not just an essay for a competition, but also his reflection as a "torchbearer".
A veiled critique and monologue of the current state of world culture.
When Lin Que typed the last period, he felt his palms were sweaty.
The word count in the bottom left corner is fixed at 2400.
It's not long, but every word carries weight.
He read it through once.
There's no sentimentality, no feel-good platitudes.
"call--"
Lin Que let out a long breath and took a big gulp of the cool boiled water next to him.
He checked the time; it was 11:30 p.m.
Teacher Shen should still be awake at this moment.
Lin Que opened WeChat and found Shen Qingqiu's profile picture.
Click to send file.
[Mushu]: Teacher Shen, the first draft for the competition is finished. Please take a look.
...
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