Wood has become a boat (Chen Danyan's Europe)

Author: Chen Danyan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-09-01
Features: Visiting museums, famous residences, and witnessing humanity's great creations displayed as still-life, just like watching a tree transform into a boat. Chen Danyan walks along, nourishing her European heart, so traveling through Europe is like returning to her spiritual homeland. Europe's great civilization, along with the charm of its ancient small towns, radiates a captivating beauty in Chen Danyan's writing. If you enjoyed "Chen Danyan's Shanghai," then "Chen Danyan's Europe" will delight you even more. Sometimes I think, it must be because of how I grew up that I became so passionate about Europe's small and large museums. Once in Europe, this enthusiasm doesn’t disappear overnight. It’s as if sesame seeds opened a door, fairies used a magic wand, tomb raiders entered the pyramids, and I found myself in Mozart’s writing "The Marriage of Figaro," standing in front of the alluring yet bewildered Venus painted by Botticelli, seeing the he left behind with a scraper, listening to someone recite "The Divine Comedy" in beautiful Italian in Dante’s, crying at the Berlin Wall Museum, and almost fainting in the Baroque Art Museum. In my heart, I pieced together fragments of Europe encountered during my long, dark growth into a spiritual homeland. Over ten years, dozens of museums—from the Louvre to the Bordeaux Sherry Museum—I worked like an ant for my spiritual homeland, because only after understanding the emptiness of having nothing did I gain the opportunity. Step by step, step by step, step by step, I walked past countless things carefully collected by humanity, recognized as worth commemorating, and carried them into my heart, watching how the world and I transformed from wood into a boat. When I saw the wind-eroded stone houses in the Italian city of Arezzo, I recalled the city depicted by Giotto five hundred years earlier, when the houses in Arezzo were still new, and always felt time rushing past like a flood. Long ago, two thousand five hundred years ago, Confucius had expressed similar sentiments. The time spent feeling these things isn’t long—ten years aren’t that many.