The Return of the Condor Heroes: Postscript
The first paragraph of "The Legend of Condor Heroes" was published in the inaugural issue of Ming Pao on May 20, 1959. This book was published for three years, that is, it was written for three years. These three years are the most difficult stage of the initial establishment of Ming Pao. When revising again, in almost every paragraph of the story, I thought of the scenes of working together with several colleagues in the past.
"Sculpture of Gods" attempts to use Yang Guo as a role to express the constraints of the world's rituals and customs on people's hearts and behaviors. The rituals and customs are temporary, but when they exist, there are huge social forces. The notion that teachers and students cannot get married certainly does not exist in the minds of modern people. However, it is justified in the era of Guo Jing and Yang Guo. However, the many rules and customs that we think are justified today are likely to be regarded as meaningless hundreds of years later?
The behavioral patterns of society, such as ethics, codes of conduct, customs, etc., often change with the times, but people’s personalities and feelings change very slowly. The joy, sorrow, nostalgia, and sorrow in the "Book of Songs" three thousand years ago are still the same as people's feelings today. I personally always feel that in novels, human character and feelings are more important than social significance. Guo Jing said: "For the country and the people, the hero is the greatest", this sentence still has great positive significance today. But I am convinced that the boundaries of the country will be eliminated in the future. At that time, the concepts of "", "resisting the enemy" and so on will not have much meaning. However, the affection and morality between parents and children, the innocent friendship, the sense of justice, kindness, courage to help others, dedication to society, etc., I believe that people will be praised for a long time in the future. This does not seem to be any political theory, economic system, etc. Social reforms, religious beliefs, etc. can replace it.
The stories of martial arts novels are inevitably excessively bizarre and coincidental. I have always hoped that martial arts can be in fact impossible, and human character should always be possible. Yang Guo and Xiaolongnv parted and reunited, and the incident was very strange, which seemed to be attributed to providence and coincidence, but in fact it had to be attributed to the personalities of the two of them. If the two of them were not so deeply in love, they would never jump into the valley one by one; if the little dragon girl was not indifferent by nature, she would never be able to live alone at the bottom of the valley; if Yang Guo was not born with the most instinct, she would definitely not be like a day for sixteen years. Never regret it. Of course, if the bottom of the valley is not a pool but a rock, the two of them jumped off to pieces, and they were finally buried in the same cave. The world meets and changes, and the success or failure is connected. Although it is about chance and luck, there is a difference between luck and misfortune, but in the final analysis, it is always determined by the original character of each person.
There is no such kind of strange bird as the **** eagle in the real world. There is a kind of "elephant bird" (Aepyornistitan) on the island of Madagascar in Africa. It is more than ten feet tall and weighs more than one thousand pounds. It is the world's largest bird and became extinct around AD 1660. Elephant birds have very thick legs and are too heavy to fly. Elephant bird eggs are six times larger than ostrich eggs. I have seen fossils of elephant bird eggs in the New York Museum, which are larger than a few sides of a small coffee table. But this bird believes that intelligence must be very low.
The revised version of "The Legend of Condor Heroes" has not changed much, mainly to fix some loopholes in the original work.
May 1976