Almighty painter

Chapter 616 Anna's Detective Cat Training and Transformation Plan

Gu Weijing looked at Koko.

This was the second time he saw the emotion of "sadness" in this girl.

The first time was when she hugged herself and cried in the room of that cheap B&B.

Is she grieving for the dancers in the theater?
Or are you grieving for your mother?
Gu Weijing didn't know.

This sadness felt different from the last time.

Last time in that little shop under the moonlight.

Koko's crying was like the silver powder of moonlight rubbed into her eyes, and even her tears were filled with the tenderness and delicacy of a girl.

But now Koko was standing there, looking at the branches above her head.

Her sadness was equally delicate, yet more grand, and carried a sense of desolation. She did not shed a single tear, and just stared quietly at the locust tree in front of her.

I saw prosperity and thought of decline.

When I see life, I think of death.

Gu Weijing pinched the leaf that Koko handed over to him.

now.

What the girl handed over seemed not to be a bright green leaf at the moment, but an illusion many years later.

Time and space interweave.

It seemed like many, many years had passed.

The beautiful dancer turned into a bloated and wrinkled fat aunt, the once handsome ugly man grew white hair, and the girl who dreamed of becoming a dancer walked away, went crazy, and died.

You suddenly.

Picked up a withered branch from the page.

Through the yellow veins, in a trance, I seemed to see again the good times when it once floated in the bright green ocean.

Theater actors leave the stage like leaves from a branch.

Their artistic life is over.

The remaining scenery and the remaining green are all illusions left over from the past.

They are just illusory ghosts.

At this moment, Gu Weijing was not thinking about painting or pondering the characters he would write.

He didn't even talk to Koko or say any free words to comfort her.

He thought of a story he had read not long ago.

Mr. Sloth is a person who has very strict requirements on understanding the original text of the work and has a high literary literacy.

Let’s talk about understanding the work first, then creating the work.

She created a shared book list specifically for Gu Weijing on social software to use as "class assignments."

When drawing illustrations for "The Little Prince".

This book list includes "The Little Prince" itself.

There are also Saint-Exupéry's "Southern Mail" and "Night Flight", as well as the part in which Márquez mentioned his insights into the works of Conrad and Saint-Exupéry and their influence on his personal writing during an interview with "The Paris Review", a top literary criticism magazine in 1981.

It was time to draw up the illustrations for The Blazing World.

This book list grew rapidly and became a super long list.

After taking Mr. Sloth’s love class, I added more books on love emotion analysis, such as Alain de Botton’s "Notebooks on Love", "The Consolation of Art", and Han Bingzhe's "Death of Lust".

There are many outstanding painters in the world.

They are completely detached from books, lacking systematic excellent education and professional subject background, and they purely rely on physical instincts and the sense of smell of the brush to paint.

Similar to Claude Nolin, the official painter to Pope Urban IV.

Before he changed his career to painting, he was a pastry chef who couldn't even recognize all the letters.

This feeling is like -

In the last century, some South American players could not even write their own names, could not calculate addition and subtraction within ten, and grew up playing street football on busy streets.

But he has an intuition like an elf and a wild football inspiration that can pin down a large number of European players from elite families who have grown up in professional football schools, surrounded by a large number of assistant coaches and fitness trainers who use shorthand notebooks to strictly calculate every passing angle and running distance, and make them unable to raise their heads.

There is no need to be secretive.

Not all artists are the type who have to sit in the library of the Royal Academy, dressed nicely and gentlemanly, talking about literature and poetry.

Some painters are just born with wild talents.

But the difference is.

The former can be cultivated, but the latter is very difficult to cultivate.

People cannot control themselves to develop just the right sense of savagery, but they can cultivate the habit of reading through persistence and hard work.

Whether it is Cao Xuan, Professor Lin Tao, or Mr. Sloth.

When they communicated and guided Gu Weijing, they all had one thing in common - that is, they all emphasized the importance of reading.

Live long, read long, learn long.

Gu Weijing discovered this.

Only then did he summarize the advanced rules. Every day when he returned home, he would take a "whip" and whip his grandfather, who was crying while he was writing reading notes.

Professor Lin Tao also demands the same of himself.

Fortunately.

Mr. Sloth is much gentler towards Detective Cat than Gu Weijing is towards Old Man Gu.

She didn't ask Gu Weijing to write a reading summary for her like he did when he punched in for work every day.

There are dozens of books, and the number is increasing at the rate of one or two books per week. Objectively speaking, it is difficult to read all of them carefully in a short period of time.

Although Anna is passionately committed to the "academic literacy transformation work" of Detective Cat Sister, she understands that cultivating a person's artistic temperament is a marathon rather than a sprint.

Marathon is not about explosive power.

It is the unwavering determination to achieve the goal, the unwavering will and focus in the face of difficulties, and the passion to gain satisfaction from the action.

She is cultivating Detective Cat's love of reading.

Read a book whenever you have time.

Most of those on the list.

If you don't have time.

Just browse it.

She focuses on reading one or two books a week, and she always picks out some interesting passages for Detective Cat to read. This can help cultivate a love for reading, which is much more important than cramming through a number of books over a cup of coffee and burning the midnight oil for a week or two.

Miss Elena is like a marathon coach. She has formulated a long-term "plan to develop a great painter detective cat" in her mind.

The work of transforming the minds of soul mates is a long and arduous task.

In order to help Detective Cat better understand the metaphor of empire in "The Blazing World" and the imagination of ancient Rome and Greece in Britain and continental Europe throughout the 17th and 18th centuries when the Duchess of Newcastle wrote this book.

She added to DetectiveCat's reading list the historical work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was published almost in the same year as The Blazing World.

It is a bit of an exaggeration to compare it to the Western Historical Records.

Although "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" lacks some explanation of historical facts and viewpoints, from today's perspective, its typical Enlightenment-era British Whig historical view also has many outdated and biased aspects.

But it can still be said that it almost pioneered the modern historical writing in Europe, if we rank all the historical books that have ever appeared in Europe.

It shouldn't be difficult to rank it in the top three.

This book was Miss Elena's introduction to history when she was a child.

She thought that for a young older sister who had no foundation in historical reading, it would be easy for her to run away when she saw the table of contents when she opened the thick million-word tome filled with "The political structure of the Antonine era" and "Claudius Albinus in Britain and Paisinius Nierge in Syria, denouncing the senator Deidius Julianus who bought the throne from the Praetorian Guard."

and so.

Miss Irina did not ask Detective Cat to read the book herself.

She would always break down the history of the Roman Empire into interesting little stories and read them to Detective Cat in between their discussions of the illustrated characters.

Pushed to the throne of emperor by the Praetorian Guards as the new king, he strode into the Senate, surrounded by the spears and tight shields of the Roman legions.

He turned a blind eye to the headless corpses of the losers, listened to the flattery of the congressmen with an expressionless face, enjoyed the sumptuous banquet, watched the dancers' performances, and played with the dice until late at night.

When the banquet was over, the guards left with the promised bounty of 6250 denarii each.

The new supreme authority of the vast empire, the glorious emperor, was surrounded by fear in the darkness, trembling and unable to sleep.

He knew that his fate was like the dice in his hand. In terms of prestige, he could not compare with the old emperor. In terms of talent, there were many people who were better than him among the corpses scattered on the ground in the Senate.

But they all died in the mutiny.

He is not the winner, he is just the one who bid the highest in the auction of power by chance.

He won one game.

But one day, tomorrow, next month, ten years later, there will be a newcomer who will throw a bigger number than him.

……

In the fifth century AD, Attila the Hun, the Scourge of God, swept across Europe and Rome fell into crisis. An envoy went to the Huns' military camp hoping to exchange tribute for peace, and the envoys were in a panic.

They knew that if the Hun king got angry, they would be nailed to the wood outside the tent and become food for hawks. At the banquet, the delegation tried every means to make Attila happy. There were people chanting long poems praising his great deeds, there were warrior fights, Moorish and Scythian clowns, and ridiculous masks performing farces.

The ministers under the Huns burst into laughter and indulged themselves.

Latin, Greek, Gaulish, Hunnic, and various local dialects that the envoys could not understand were mixed together. It seemed that everyone was moved by this joyful scene. Only Attila sat high on the throne, his expression unchanged, his face as clear as water. Just when the envoys were pessimistically thinking, this "scourge of God" had no normal human emotions at all.

The curtain of the big tent was lifted.

A little child walked in, and in an instant, this war-like man showed the kindness and tenderness of an ordinary father in front of everyone.

"Attila held his son on his knees and stroked the child's delicate face with his fingers covered with hard calluses from archery. When the child cried, he quickly broke off the barbecue in front of him and fed him."

That was Attila's youngest son.

His name was Irnak.

When he was born, the priest around Attila told him that this child came into the world with supreme glory and he would become the backbone of the family and the empire.

Regrettably.

Attila would not know.

With his sudden death in history, the vast empire he left behind, stretching from the Caspian Sea in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, from the Danube River in the south to the Baltic Sea in the north, collapsed and declined in an instant.

No son became a true pillar of support.

It starts with one person and ends with one person.

It left many unsolved mysteries for historians.

……

In the seventh century AD, when Byzantium was about to collapse completely, Emperor Heraclius suddenly led his guards to rush towards the enemy. In the following eleven-hour battle, he personally beheaded the enemy general. After the war, the emperor walked to the steps of Hagia Sophia, holding a piece of broken wood in both hands.

This was his trophy, a fragment of the True Cross taken down from the scaffold where Jesus was crucified, which was said to be in the hands of the Persians.

From now on.

Rome's life was extended by another 700 years.

……

Mr. Sloth’s small classroom is of this style.

Always with her unique warmth and patience.

In her voice, there is no this chart, that map, this governing strategy, that tax policy.

From the four emperors to the six Augustus, and a series of names so long that people can't even count how many letters there are in them, this Nous, that Nous (note), they are not the common rulers of the world, kings who exercise divine power, they have all become ordinary individuals with emotions.

The fate of the empire lies in their glory and sin, courage and fear, and in the leisurely reading of Mr. Sloth.

The waves rise and fall.

(Note: The last syllable of the Roman emperor's name usually ends with "-nus".)
This is part of Anna's transformation plan for Detective Cat.

But Gu Weijing would never feel that reading or listening to Mr. Sloth’s lectures were boring or some kind of painting task that had to be completed.

It is a very happy feeling that makes people not feel tired or even the passage of time.

Do you feel tired in the colorful garden?
No.

You will only feel happy because you have discovered a bright flower that you have never seen before.

Listen to Mr. Sloth reading.

It is like lying in a garden of soul and knowledge.

If he knew about the heartwarming reading and emotional classroom provided by Miss Elena for Detective Cat, and compared it with the grandson sitting next to him like a cold-faced judge, supervising him to write a book report, and not allowing him to read novels, play chess, or go out to play photography with his aunts if he didn't finish reading the corresponding pages, he might have cried out loudly.

But this is not the point.

Standing next to Koko, I felt the sadness in her words.

Gu Weijing remembered the first day when Mr. Sloth introduced him to "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire".

That evening.

The other party did not read to him the story about any ancient Roman emperor, but instead read to him a short passage from the autobiography of Edward Gibbon, the author of the book.

"On the evening of October 1764, 10, I sat at the foot of the Capitoline Hill. Mr. Gibbon wrote this -" Mr. Sloth said, "Amid the scattered Roman ruins, I was meditating, and the evening prayers of barefoot monks came from the distant temple. At that moment, I thought, I must write something."

"Inside his huge ghostly body, I seemed to see yesterday's time reappear, and I felt the urge to write. This laid the emotional tone for the entire history of rise and fall."

(End of this chapter)