A Picture of Country Life: 10 Classic Readings_After Reading_Masterpiece Readings

The Picturesque View of Country Life is a hardcover book written by [Israel] Amos Oz and published by Yelin Publishing House, the book is priced at 35.00, the number of pages: 204, the article bar I have carefully collated some of the readers' after-thoughts, I hope that it will be useful to you.

"Pictures of Country Life" read (1): country life mourning scene

Recently, I have a backlog of several short story collections that I haven't read (I really quite like short stories), they are V.S. Naipaul's Miguel Street, Alice Munro's Escape, Conrad's Deep in the Dark, Ge Fei's The Encounter, and Gerlang's Seven Voices. ...... If you're lucky enough to come across this book review, I also suggest you find it. Well, not much to say, back to today's book "rural life", the reason why I ordered, because it was named "annual Jingdong Literary Award - foreign writers work", the prize money as high as 1 million, although the money to measure the value of a book is a bit vulgar, but I think the key to it is worth it.

In my opinion it is worth it. Like every writer who likes to play a big game, Amos Oz is clearly not content to tell one bizarre story in itself. In this collection of short stories, he sets out to explore some new family relationships. Set in the Menashe Hill village of Trijilan, the book's main characters move through so many streets: Founders Street, Synagogue Street, Vine Street, and Tribe of Israel Street. Together, these characters build the legend of a village more than a hundred years old, with details echoed, plots linked, characters interspersed, and, best of all, the most critical breakthrough in one story comes from a seemingly unintentional reference in another.

(The following is partly based on @JadeKnight's review of Village Life for the Unconscious, link: //douban/doubanapp/dispatch?uri=/review/8348117/ amp;dt_ref= 02B380E3F459AA448E530105625086E90FC5B6CDE510CA3811F5F5D1F4D3E9C2F0C3471A92B239488C amp;dt_dapp=1)

The first Heir tells the story of a real estate agent who comes to Ari Yeh Czernik's house, wanting to buy his family's old mansion to convert it into a vacation resort. And the first sentence of the opening line is so powerful that it makes your heart flutter:

This stranger is no stranger.

For his host, Czernik, the visitor is something else, a déjà vu, as if conjuring up a dream, and "ninety percent of the dream had disappeared, with only a tail still visible". This "visitor" is not isolated, but, abstracted, he can unite the many jumbles of memory in the seven stories that follow:

In "Relatives," does the coat that country doctor Gilly Steiner takes from her car belong, as she thinks, to her nephew, whom she has not seen for a long time? In "Digging," does a former congressman, Kadeem, always hear someone digging in the middle of the night when his daughter doesn't, and does such a sound exist or not? In "Lost," is the fleeting female stroller that real estate agent Josie Sassoon encounters on her way to negotiate the acquisition of an old mansion real or a phantom? And then there's "Song," in which, at a singing party that is an important communal event in Tri Yilan, "I" am always interrupted by the thought that I should take one thing from my coat without knowing exactly what it is I'm supposed to take. These psychological states of the characters, such as "feeling that something is wrong" or "not knowing what I should do", have become the collective unconscious that pervades the entire village of Trijiland.

Oz doesn't give an answer to the question of whether or what these are. He doesn't even give the end of each story, which ends abruptly in the air of suspense.

"Lost," in which the "I," real estate agent Yossi Sassoon, wants to buy an old house known as "The Ruins," the former home of the Holocaust writer Rubin, is emblematic of this. "I meet his daughter, Yardena, when I make a house call. Yardena takes me through the maze of the old house and leaves me in the silent, dark cellar. "She closed the door and left me there in my wheelchair in a deep sleep. I knew everything was going to be all right and there was no need to rush things." The whole story seems like a murder mystery, motivated by the desire to stop the destruction of the old mansion. But it's here that Oz puts down his pen, leaving both the fate of the protagonist and the reader's suspicions unconfirmed (it's not until the penultimate story, "The Song," that the name Yossi Sassoon resurfaces and attends the party, but we don't really know how he got out of the cellar).

As a story title, "Lost" is also a metaphor. The real estate agent's encounter signals a dichotomy between modernity and tradition, and everyone, including himself, is lost in that dichotomy. It should be noted that this beautiful village called Tri Yilan is not an idyllic pastoral existence in Oz's writing, but is full of transitions to modernity. Rather than a village in the traditional sense, it is more like a tourist resort for city dwellers, crowded with sightseers' cars every weekend, and tourists lingering in the various stalls and workshops run by the villagers.

As for the village, "Dig" has an interesting supporting character in Adil. This is an Arab boy who rents the home of a former member of parliament, Kedem, with the goal of writing a book comparing life in a Jewish village with life in an Arab village. He argues, "Your village stems from a dream, from a plan. Our villages do not come from anything, but are always right there." The direct reference behind this conclusion is naturally the history between the Arab and Jewish communities.

The collective unconscious of Triyiland is brought into focus, or unleashed in a concentrated way, at the end of the Song. I, who has been haunted by the idea that I should take one thing during the choral evening, wanders into an abandoned room. "What am I doing here? I can't answer that question. Yet I knew from the beginning of the night, and perhaps from long before, that I wanted to be in this abandoned bedroom. ...... So I got down on all fours at the foot of the double bed, rolled up the bedspread, and tried to feel my way through the dark space under the bed by the pale light of a flashlight."

As with other stories, the novel ends abruptly here. Based on the intermittent clues above, it's not hard to guess that this room would have been the original bedroom of the host couple, abandoned because their sixteen-year-old only son had shot himself here a number of years earlier, and the exact location of the suicide was under the bed. The unconscious dictates that "I" come to the room and feel under the bed, which is a reenactment of life for myself, and makes the story a closed loop, with the beginning and the end connecting. For me, who has always been tormented by anxiety, this is a kind of salvation from death. This unconscious action has brought the unconsciousness of the whole village down to earth.

In "A Faraway Place", "I" appears in a world that is extremely chaotic and ugly, where everything seems very scary, and all the dangers are thrown directly to the surface. I" was sent to save the people here, but can not see any improvement, people not only did not get better, but also make himself lose all the management position, "I" long for someone to take over his post, want to leave this place, but has been waiting for no hope. In the story, the villagers saw the strange strange man and who is it? "Suddenly, a healthy, handsome stranger appeared on the top of the hill to the east, between the people and the rising sun." Oz's emphasis here on his "good health and handsomeness" contrasts with the image of the villagers, and perhaps the author uses the sun to symbolize the emergence of a new kind of hope, of life. But this contrast is seen as dangerous by the villagers, who clamor for him to be captured and killed.

In these short stories, Oz is not committed to carving and polishing the storyline, and several of them end abruptly, as if the tail of the one-percenter had been decisively cut off by Oz. Oz describes more of an emotion, a feeling, an unconscious sensation that is strange but not so strange, a not-so-clear frustration in a hazy fog.

This feeling includes the conflicting struggles of longing to escape but carrying the burden of loved ones' past (heir, excavation), the loneliness of not being able to bear but being too timid to admit it (kinship), the disorientation of tradition and reality (disorientation), the waiting to free oneself from the shackles of a boring, uniform life and the wait for the latter (waiting), and the unconscious feeling that seems to be there but is difficult to depict and grasp. This kind of emotion, feeling is more powerful than the story, entangled in the depths of the heart, constantly beat and erode our hearts.

"Pictures of Country Life": The Tail of a Dream

My favorite line in the book is: "Ninety percent of the dream has disappeared, and only a tail remains. It seems to say that I am not dreaming at the moment, but I am so desperate that I feel I have only one tail left. After reading the eight stories in Pictures of Country Life, I found that Oz surprised me, but also gave me many questions. The whole time I was reading this book, I was in a trance, so vague that I couldn't even read the stories or find the main characters, let alone try to guess what Oz was trying to say. The whole book every word every sentence, black and white said very clearly, but all seem to be like drifting and floating without any basis, I seem to be Oz draw the soul, but can not see his hand. In Oz's writing, these eight stories exist independently of each other, but they are linked together as the same story, and the characters walk through different stories, like watching a movie and switching between different scenes. The eight stories are linked together as well as interconnected, perhaps the poker handbook narrative of future literature. Oz's storytelling is also a conscious depiction of what appears to be a "structure of feeling". Stephen King says that writers are stenographers, writing down the words of the gods. I think Oz is just such a being. When I read the book for the first time, I was stringing the stories together, and I was still trapped in the labyrinth set by Oz. When I read the book, I always had a pen and notebook around to sketch the characters and details, and finally I tried to project a movie in my mind, connecting each person in the eight stories to a complete picture. Oz is set in an ancient Israeli village where disturbing truths are hidden everywhere beneath the surface of a quiet life. A stranger's visit shatters Czernik's peaceful life, and the deep-seated resentment in his heart is like a tidal wave; Pesach, who is in a trance, often hears the sound of underground digging at night and can't sleep well, but his daughter Rahael just thinks he's not sleeping well; Adil, an Arab boy who is living in the house, hears the sound of digging, and finally Rahael hears a similar sound one insomnia-inducing night; Dr. Steiner, the doctor, waits for his nephew but he doesn't arrive; and the truth is that a phone call could have clarified the matter. She waits for her nephew for a long time, but when it is clear that she can find out what is going on with one phone call, she has to chase him to the driver's house to check it out, and imagines that her nephew is on his way in her loneliness; Josie, a real estate agent, follows a young girl on a tour of an old mansion, and is tempted by her desire to be imprisoned in the cellar; the mayor of the village, Aveni, is disturbed by a strange note he receives from his wife, who has suddenly vanished without a word from him; and the depressed teenage boy, Kauppi, falls in love with a woman who is twice his age. Ada, in the desire for love and the expression of ignorance, Cobby finally left in a hurry and Ada as strangers to each other. ...... All eight stories are like probing mysteries leaving the reader with a question at the end. In "The Heir", did Cailnik sell the house to a stranger or not? And in the beginning, the author's first line is intriguing: "The stranger was no stranger." For Czernik, the owner of the house, "he couldn't remember when or where he had seen this strange and familiar man." And there was something about the stranger that appealed to him, as if he had summoned a dream from memory, "as if it were a dream, ninety percent of which had disappeared, with only a tail still visible." While the specific identity of the visitor is not explained by the author, he knows the place like the back of his hand and has insight into Czernik's thoughts, which scares and intrigues Czernik. The stranger's arrival gradually leads to other story characters. As mentioned about Yossi, the main character in "Lost," "Once, he even had his property appraised by real estate agent Yossi Sassoon. These suppressed hopes fill him with guilt and self-hatred. Strangely, this obnoxious fellow seems to be able to see through his shameful thoughts." Chernick's mental activity, all of his struggles, are dismantled one by one here by a stranger who is running to sell his house and turn his wealth around, and the essence behind the breaching of the calm is a consideration of Chernick's desires. Like "The Heir," the other stories leave the question equally vague. In "Relatives," is the coat that Dr. Steiner finds in the chauffeur's car her nephew's, as she thinks? Clinging to the fact that she imagined her nephew was on his way here without calling to confirm, she grieves alone. "In the middle of the night, she undressed and went to bed. It started raining in Tri Yilan. It rained all night." In "Excavations," Pesach always hears someone digging in the middle of the night while his daughter Rahael doesn't hear it, but eventually Rahael goes to verify it when she hears a similar sound while she's losing sleep, but the author doesn't explain the results of Rahael's search. "The darkness was thick and oppressive, and the heat hung heavy over everything. Rahael Franco stood alone, trembling in the darkness under the dim starlight." So does such a voice exist or not? Is the fleeting woman real estate agent Josie meets in Lost real or a vision? And who comes to his rescue when he ends up imprisoned in the cellar? Was it the mysterious woman? "She closed the door and left me there in my wheelchair in a deep sleep. I knew everything would work out and there was no need to rush things." The story is enigmatic, and the mysterious woman takes Josie deeper and deeper into the depths in a way that makes you feel a cold chill down your back, like a gruesome murder, and the motive is to stop Josie from acquiring the old mansion. Of course, "Lost" does not tell if he ever comes out, until the final "Song", where all the characters reappear at one of the most important singing parties in Tri Yilan. Josie reappears, led by the sight of "I", "Josie Sassoon, the tall, bearded real estate agent who said mockingly, 'So what's your proposal, Gilly ......' " 'In Waiting', why did Benny's wife Nava suddenly disappear as if she had vaporized, and was that scarf he picked up his wife or not? And again the ending is similar to "Kindred Spirits", "A light rain began to fall, and he buttoned up his coat and sat waiting for his wife." This made me think again out of the blue that the two stories take place on the same day, with different characters in different corners, like two images switching in a movie. In Song, why does "I" have to find a spot between the bookshelf and the fishbowl every time, and what does "my" obsession with this spot mean? Maybe it's a good spot where "I" can see all the characters? "I always hear someone calling my name, but when I turn around to look for it, I can't find it, as if I were hallucinating, and this feeling of "me" has always led me to try to see "me"! This feeling of "I" has been leading me to try to see who "I" am and what my name is. However, I couldn't find the answer, just as I did when I heard a hallucination. At the same time, I had frequent thoughts of taking something out of my coat, but I did not know what I was supposed to take. And the thoughts were interrupted at times. "From that moment I suddenly felt that I had to go immediately to the room where I kept my coat and take something from one of the pockets. The matter seemed very urgent, but I could not think what it was. Nor could I make out who it was that was calling out to me again ......" Finally, "I" felt under the bed in the room that belonged to the hostess of the singing session in the story and her husband, whose sixteen-year-old child had shot himself under the bed. My uncontrollable behavior was as much a redemption for the young man as it was for the whole countryside. The "I" in the story felt like a mistake. Comparing the other stories, we can find that the psychological state of "I" appears in every character in each story, as if everyone has entered into each other's dreams, a kind of audio-visual and visionary state pervades the whole village of Tri-Yilan, making it a kind of collective unconsciousness. In "A Distant Place on the Other Side", "I" appeared in an extremely chaotic and ugly world, where everything appeared to be very scary and all the dangers were thrown right to the surface. "Many of the people here are physically defective, suffering from goiters, mental defects, deformed limbs, facial spasms, and drooling due to the fact that they are inbred: brothers and sisters, sons and mothers, fathers and daughters copulating." And "I" was sent to save the people here, but can not see the improvement, the people not only did not get better, but also make himself lose all the management position, "I" long for someone to take over his position, want to leave this place, but have been waiting for hope. In the story, the villagers saw the strange strange man and who is it? "Suddenly, a healthy, handsome stranger appeared on the top of the hill to the east, between the people and the rising sun." Oz's emphasis here on his "good health and handsomeness" contrasts with what we see here in the villagers, and perhaps the author uses the sun to symbolize the emergence of a new kind of hope, of life. But this contrast is dangerous to the villagers, who clamor to catch and kill him. Throughout the eight stories, Oz walks through the book from the perspectives of "I" and "he," making the whole story seem confusing. In "The Song" and "A Faraway Place", the main character "I", unlike in the previous stories, is not given a clear identity or name, as in the others, but rather is present as a pair of eyes to everyone in the story. Characters and unanswered questions are brought up again in the sight of "I", the soul of Oz, who revisits each of the characters, pushing the story forward *** until all the truths come to the surface. In the development of the countryside, the sale of the old house is undoubtedly a kind of modern and traditional confrontation, in Oz's writing, this beautiful village called Tri Yilan, is precisely in the transition of modernity. And in the transition, it is the breeding of all kinds of desires and greed. I think that perhaps this is the spiritual homeland of the Israelis that Oz wants to appeal to. The "picture of village life" is just a pavilion built by human beings for self-comfort, which seems too unreal and faces the danger of sudden collapse at any time, and the traditional spirit endowed by human beings on its surface is also dimmed, which reveals the nostalgia of Oz's spiritual support. This can not help but make me think of the current development of rural tourism, in recent years, the most beautiful countryside tourism theme in the tourism industry to do as hot as naphthalene. Rural scenic area to develop, we have to speak with local residents and win-win mutual benefit, economic interests continue to expand, the consequence is that people's desire for a hair, scenic tourist capacity will be loaded, the original ecology of the countryside ultimately be destroyed. Finally, with the end of the story: the old gravedigger said: 'What's the use of saying this? The sun has risen, and the white man there, or the white man we think is there, has disappeared behind the dirt. There's no use talking. Another hot day. Time to go to work. Whoever can work, let him work, act, shut up. Whoever can't work, let him die. That's all.' Afterword: First of all, thank you so much to the readers who made it to the end, this fic was really great and I kind of like Oz now, haha. This is the longest book review I've ever written, more than three thousand in one breath, I can finally turn off my computer. I've been freaking myself out writing this review, especially when I was rethinking the Lost and Dig complex, and I got a chill down my spine. As I was concentrating, my roommate tapped me on the shoulder, which made me scream, and I gradually relaxed as I talked about rural tourism later in the review. I hope I don't have a nightmare tonight.

A Picture of Country Life (3): Country Life for the Unconscious

"We forget something, and then we forget what it is that we forgot, and yet we keep being able to remember such a strange feeling." That's how Israeli author Amos Oz described his latest collection of short stories, Pictures of Country Life, when he came to China in July. The **** same setting for the stories in the book is a village of Jewish pioneers called Tri Yilan, which, according to Oz, originated in one of his empty dreams.

Reading all eight stories in the book, one realizes that Oz is true to his word. The sense of being in a trance, of being lost, envelops almost all the details, every word, every sentence, in black and white, is clear to the eye, but it is as if it were empty and unsupported, as if Oz had taken away the pillar we are used to understanding and experiencing as "narrative" - of course, there is always narrative. -Of course, narrative always exists, but in his writing, it is a conscious depiction of the "structure of feeling" on which each story relies to form a whole, and on which the eight stories are interconnected. And like Oz's own metaphor of "feeling that you have forgotten something but not knowing what it is", this structure of feeling is not clearly delineated and painful, not thorough, but is full of ambiguity and ambiguity, which makes it even more difficult to form into a linguistic level. In contrast, the construction of a plot is not so difficult.

This sense of structure begins with the first sentence of the first book. It's called "The Heir," and it's about a real estate agent who comes to Aryeh Czernik's house and wants to buy his old mansion and turn it into a resort. And it starts with a powerful first sentence that makes the heart flutter:

This stranger was no stranger.

For his host, Czernik, the visitor is something else, a déjà vu, as if conjuring up a dream, and "ninety percent of the dream had disappeared, with only a tail still visible". This "visitor" is not isolated, but if abstracted, he can unify many of the chaotic memories of the seven stories that follow: in "Relatives," does the coat that country doctor Gilly Steiner takes from the car belong to a nephew she hasn't seen for a long time, as she thinks she does? In "Digging," does a former congressman, Kadeem, always hear someone digging in the middle of the night when his daughter doesn't, and does such a sound exist or not? In "Lost," is the fleeting female stroller that real estate agent Josie Sassoon encounters on her way to negotiate the acquisition of an old mansion real or a phantom? And then there's "Song," in which, at a singing party that is an important communal event in Tri Yilan, "I" am always interrupted by the thought that I should take one thing from my coat without knowing exactly what it is I'm supposed to take. Such psychological states of the characters as "feeling that something is wrong" or "not knowing what I should do" have become the collective unconscious that pervades the entire village of Trijilan.

Oz doesn't give an answer to the question of whether or what these are. He doesn't even give the end of each story, which ends abruptly in the air of suspense. Of course, as he said himself, this is for the "life has no end" of this kind of realistic imitation, but perhaps we can also read out a deeper flavor. The "I" in "Lost," the real estate agent Yossi Sassoon, wants to buy an old house called "The Ruins," which used to be the home of the Holocaust writer Rubin. "When I visit the house, I meet his daughter, Yardena. Yardena leads me through the labyrinthine maze of the old house, and I am left in the silent, dark cellar. "She closed the door and left me there in my wheelchair in a deep sleep. I knew everything would be fine, there was no need to rush." That's the last sentence. The whole story seems suspiciously like a murder case, with the motive being to stop the old mansion from being destroyed. But it is here that Oz puts down his pen, leaving both the fate of the protagonist and the reader's suspicions unconfirmed (until the penultimate story, "The Song," in which the name Yossi Sassoon reappears and attends the party, but we don't know how he got out of the cellar).

As a story title, "Lost" is also a metaphor. The real estate agent's encounter signals a dichotomy between modernity and tradition, and everyone, including himself, is lost in that dichotomy. It should be noted that this beautiful village called Tri Yilan is not an idyllic place in Oz's writing, but is full of transitions to modernity. Rather than a village in the traditional sense, it is more like a tourist resort for city dwellers, packed with sightseeing vehicles every weekend, and tourists lingering in the various stalls and workshops run by the villagers. This hustle and bustle is clearly different from the empty, deserted village that surfaced in Oz's dream. Perhaps it can be said that the latter is the spiritual homeland of the Israelis, while the former is an irreplaceable reality. The so-called "picture of village life" has also become a pavilion temporarily lifted by modernity, which will suddenly collapse and annihilate at an unknown time and place, and the spiritual tradition attached to it will also be dimmed - so it is not difficult to read out this kind of nostalgia from the sense of trance that envelops the whole book. It is not difficult to read such a layer of nostalgia in the trance that envelops the whole book. Different from Pamuk's strong "nostalgia" in Istanbul, Oz's writing style of the countryside is more clear, describing the reality in white, to the point, and soon returned to the village of the group of people who "lost something". But with such emotion, the reader, as an onlooker, seems to be able to vaguely realize what kind of shape their lost things are in - though still not being able to overstep the author and the characters in determining what they are.

Regarding the village, there's an interesting supporting character in The Dig, Adil. This is an Arab boy who rents the home of a former congressman, Kedem, with the goal of writing a book comparing life in a Jewish village with life in an Arab village. He argues, "Your village stems from a dream, from a plan. Our villages do not come from anything, but are always right there." The direct reference behind this conclusion is naturally the history between the Arab and Jewish communities, while also alluding to Oz's dream. However, Adil's impression of the "peace and quiet" of Trijilan is mostly a result of childhood visits to a reality that is now entwined with the inexplicable sound of digging. This symbolic disruption and disturbance of dreams and imaginations may, as the aging Cadham repeats, "remind us of the destruction of the mind".

The collective unconscious of Trieuiland is brought into focus, or unleashed in a concentrated way, at the end of the Song. I, who has been haunted by the idea that I should take one thing during the chorus, walks into an abandoned room. "What am I doing here? I can't answer that question. However, I knew that I had wanted to come to this abandoned bedroom since the beginning of the night, and perhaps since a long time ago. ...... So I got down on all fours at the foot of the double bed, rolled up the bedspread, and tried to feel my way through the dark space under the bed by the pale light of the flashlight." As in other stories, the novel ends abruptly here. Based on the intermittent clues above, it's not hard to guess that this room was the original bedroom of the host couple, since their sixteen-year-old only son had been abandoned here a number of years earlier after he shot himself in the head, and the exact location of the suicide was under the bed. "I" was dominated by an unconsciousness, came to the room, felt under the bed, is life for their own re-enactment, but also make the story first and last together, become a circle. For me, who has always been tormented by anxiety, this is a kind of salvation from death. This unconscious action, but the whole village of unconsciousness fell to the ground.

"Inside everyone is a reflection of their childhood. In some you can see that child still alive; in others they carry a dead child." You can see that the search for that "child" leads vaguely to a path to the homeland - whether it is the spatial homeland of the countryside or the temporal homeland of childhood.

A Picture of Country Life (4): The Search

I read this book from a different perspective than several other reviews.

Several of the stories have the heroes making one decision and doing the opposite, such as "The Heir" where Arieli decides not to let an uninvited guest into the house but ends up in bed with him and his mother, "The Relatives" where Gilly decides to go home and wait for her nephew or his caller but heads for the bus driver's house instead, and "The Lost" where Josie makes up her mind about thanking the girl and comes back another day but is not there when she's not expecting her. Lost" in which Josie decides to thank the girl and come back another day, but is lured by her deeper and deeper into the old mansion, or "Stranger" in which Cobby is ready to confess his love but has a rude skinship with the one he loves, or "Waiting" in which the mayor of the village waits senselessly on a park bench, or "The Song", in which I have no name or identity and have the impulse to burrow under the bed of the master's bedroom. impulse.

"As if it were a dream, ninety percent of which is gone, with only a tail still visible." ("The Heir") I wake up every day, always grasping that little bit of the tail of the dream to try to follow the trail to find the full dream, but of course the result is futile, so there is always a feeling of frustration when I wake up. "We forget one thing, and then we forget exactly what we forgot, but we can always remember such a strange feeling." This is how Amos Oz described his collection of short stories, Pictures of Country Life, when he came to China. The main character in the stories is like us trying to retrieve last night's dream, searching for something that we don't know what it looks like or what it is.

"If our national poet, Bialik, seeks in this song to ask what love is and who we are, how can we, not being poets, boast of knowing the answer to this question?" ("Song") But the author nevertheless gives his reflections through the mouth of Pesach. "We are fleeting shadows, like yesterday that has just passed." ("Excavations") Very much like the analogy that not only dreams are fleeting, but even we ourselves are fleeting. In "Song", "I" always hear someone calling my name, and then I am driven by my inner impulse to run under my master's bed and search for him; in "A Distant Place", "I" keep waiting for a tougher young man to take over my position so that I can leave this degraded place, I have been waiting for a tougher young man to take over my position and leave this corrupt place. When my magic power over the villagers faded and I became numb to all the filth, a healthy and handsome young man appeared on the top of the eastern hill. What they are searching for is a connection between themselves and the world.