how to count your days

Mason 2022-04-16 09:01:09

I often feel that language is pale, especially in the face of memories.
The loneliness of an old man is something that cannot be said. There are many elderly people in the community where I live. Sometimes they sit in the dark corridors of the building, motionless, watching people come and go for hours. This is actually a common scene in Shanghai's alley community, but only when people realize that a certain part of their body or their heart is no longer young can they truly empathize with, and be tolerant and sympathetic to, those old lives.
The Japanese animation short "Reminiscence Building Block House" is also about a lonely old man's memories of life, which reminds me of Bergman's "Wild Strawberry". In "Wild Strawberry", it is also an accidental incident that strung up an old man's recollection of the past: Isaac was going back to his alma mater to receive an honorary degree, and a nightmare in the morning made him change his original plan to take a plane, and drove all the way back to school. Along the way, he also revisited the old places and picked up many memories...
Of course, in such a 12-minute animation without dialogue, to find the ultimate inquiry and human reflection as deep as Bergman, is not possible. However, I think Kato Hisoto is also very good. He uses seemingly absurd but interesting story lines to make the whole story full of morals, not just an old man's emotional nostalgia for the past.
Kato let the old man live in the middle of the water. The water is constantly rising every day. The old man must constantly build bricks, add floors, and move upwards to find a resting place. One day when he was building a house, his pipe fell, so he had to borrow a diving suit and dive downstairs to find the pipe he was used to. The moment he picked up the pipe, he suddenly thought of his deceased wife, and his thoughts and memories led him to continue to dive down to find the lives and memories that he had left behind...
The concept of this floor is somewhat like "Inception" The memory prison that Leonardo built for himself. The difference is that Leonardo's prison is buried with the past that he doesn't want to face; and when the old man who built the house went further downstream, he found more and more beauty and joy, when he finally came to the bottom. At the time, he regained his childhood, youth, love and dreams.
Because of this kind of search, the whole story is full of morals: the constantly rising water constantly builds up the floors, which symbolizes the whole life that is constantly striving to be higher; and in each relocation of the old man, those homes and objects (later being relocated) It was those furniture and objects that triggered his memories), which symbolized the beauty that had to be given up in the life of striving for the top.
The whole floor, the higher the lonelier, the happier the lower. This is of course the law of time, and no one is spared; but why is it not our own choice?
One day when I came home from get off work, an old man in the building got into an argument with the concierge for some reason, and then splattered it. He sat down in front of the elevator door, bare upper body, dropped the old wine bottle, and threw the longevity fruit on the ground, but he still scolded, making the whole building unable to get up and down. Although everyone glared at him, I sympathized with this old man very much: he was an old man who lived alone. He wanted to come to life with various unsatisfactory things, and finally his temper became more and more restless, and now he has destroyed this self-drinking and drinking for nothing At night, which was one of his few joys.
Bei Dao said: "At that time we had dreams, about literature, about love, and about traveling through the world. Now we drink late at night, and the cups meet, and it's the sound of broken dreams." I can't ask, the broken wine The old man who threw the bottle of longevity fruit all over the place, what kind of experience piled up the current him; I can't guess, all the friends who are running on the road of time like me, their hearts, their regrets, and their tomorrows ...
time flies, and an old man can't resist looking forward. Moses wrote these words before he died: "The years we spend are like a sigh. The years of our life are seventy years old, and if we are strong we may be eighty years old; Toil and sorrow are gone in a blink of an eye, and we are flying away." However, he did not just sigh in grief, in the same poem, he also wrote: "Please teach us how to count. Our own days, so that we may gain a wise heart.” I think this is an old man who has walked with God for many years. When the years of his life are coming to an end, he can give his people and the descendants of faith the best prayers and prayers. bless.

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