Railing Codex

作家、评论家，1972年生于辽宁抚顺，现居上海。曾荣获首届“短篇小说双年奖”、“单向街书店文学奖”，短篇小说《等下雪》入选“《收获》2021年度小说排行榜”。已出版作品《伊春》、《隐》、《空隙》、《抚顺故事集》、《积木书》、《被夺走了时间的蚂蚁》、《灵魂应是可以随时飞起的鸟》、《细听鬼唱诗》、《最好的旅行》。

Born in 1972 in Fushun in Liaoning province, Zhao Song is a writer and critic based in Shanghai. His awards include the Biennial Short Story Prize and the One-Way Street Literary Prize, and his story “Waiting for the Snow” was included in the best stories of 2021 published by Harvest. He is the author of nine books.

若不是执拗地牵连历史，那么任何一件被藏入博物馆或私家专柜的瓷器，或是祖传的盘子、碗和杯具，就自然引发别样的理解。即使不知道它们由瓷石、高岭土、石英石、莫来石等材料烧制而成，也不会影响你独自面对它们所含蓄的那种寂静。它们在那里，出自哪个年代已不重要，里面藏蓄的气息与痕迹，只与此刻的你有关。在你们之间的时间是完整的，而在它们与世界之间的时间则是断裂破碎的，即使历史假装已将无数碎片重新粘合为完整的景象也无济于事。当然，那些近乎完美的瓷器也会让人们看不到这种断裂与破碎，就像星辰让人们常常忘了黑暗虚空的无限。据说，天朝曾在三百年里向欧洲出售了3亿件瓷器，还有相当多的瓷器跟沉船一道没入海底。

If you don’t drag in history, any pieces of porcelain collected by a museum or on private display—or even plates, bowls, or cups that once belonged to a distant relative—naturally spark a peculiar form of comprehension. You may not know they’re made by firing together materials like pottery stone, kaolin, quartz, and feldspar, but that won’t change the stillness you feel as you stand alone before them. They’re simply there, and it doesn’t matter what era they’re from: the breath and traces they contain concern only you, who belong to this moment. Between you two, time is intact, but between them and the world time is fractured and fissured, and even history’s pretense of reassembling the innumerable pieces into a whole is of no use. Of course, nearly perfect porcelains keep us from seeing these fractures and fissures, just as the stars often make us forget the vast and empty dark. They say that over 300 years the Celestial Empire sold 300 million pieces of porcelain to Europe, and a good deal besides lies shipwrecked at the bottom of the sea.