The house has been built, with two floors, seven or eight rooms, and a large balcony. It is located on a peninsula surrounded by water on three sides. Since I was out of reach, I couldn't be there to supervise the work often, and the intermittent construction took more than a year. The house was built into a red brick house, which has also become my great regret.

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In my memory, most of the houses here used to be stilted buildings, half sitting and half hanging by the mountain, which has many advantages such as saving land, saving labor, and avoiding tides. The walls are mostly made of stones or blue bricks, which are very clean and cool. The blue bricks, also known as "smoke bricks" here, are "choked" with smoke in a firewood kiln and retain the color of blue smoke forever. It can be inferred that in ancient China, firewood was used as the main fuel for burning bricks, and blue bricks became the color of the Qin Dynasty, the color of the Han Dynasty, the color of the Tang and Song Dynasties, and the color of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. This color even locks the interest of future generations and prefabricates our understanding of Chinese culture: it seems that only under the background of blue bricks, bamboo tables and chairs are harmonious, and porcelain pots and porcelain cups are suitable. Poetry or a scripture has its downfalls, roots and bottom line, and it is in harmony with the spirit of the wall.

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Blue brick is a kind of architectural pictograph, and it is a piece of ancient ink stamps, which can continuously deliver the scattered memories to today.

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More than two years ago, Lao Li told me on a long-distance call: "The bricks have been burned and bought. Would you like to come and have a look?" Take care of my house building. After I received the call, I took advantage of the Spring Festival holiday to fly to Hunan excitedly to see the goods at the construction site, but I was greatly disappointed. The blue bricks he mentioned were cyan bricks, but few of them were considered upright. After a collision during transportation, either the edge was missing or the corner was damaged, and it became a round slag. It seems that the kiln temperature is not in place, and many bricks will produce powder when they are pinched, and even if they are used to cover pigsties, they may not be reliable.

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Lao Li saw my disappointment and said ashamedly that the old kilns for firing blue bricks were all abandoned, the kilns who were familiar with the old craftsmanship died, and the craftsmanship has been lost.

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Has no one passed down the old craftsmanship?

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He said that now all houses are built with machine-made red bricks. The pictures are cheap, stable in quality, and fast in production. Naturally, they can’t make money by relying on old craftsmanship.

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As soon as the house was built, the pot was smashed like this, and tens of thousands of bricks were lost in the fake potter. I remember that some people in the city used blue bricks to build their houses. I called and asked, only to find out that it is no longer a construction material, but a decorative material. Leaving aside the transportation cost, the price of the brick itself has made people Take a breath. Only then did I know that nostalgia has a cost. Once the cost rises, tradition becomes the patent of the rich.

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I once said that the so-called human nature contains both emotions and desires. Emotions are mostly connected with things in the past, and desires are mostly connected with things in the future. Therefore, emotions are mostly conservative, and desires are mostly new. For example, if a person is lustful and greedy, it is very likely that he will change his mind in the infinite spring - this is desire. But when a person misses his mother, he will never want his mother to undergo frequent plastic surgery and be ever-changing. Even if the mother becomes a beauty on the operating table, is that still a mother? Can it still arouse the memory and distress in our hearts? This is emotion, or rather, people's constant demand for emoticons.

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The times are changing too fast to slow down and stop the economic frenzy, which is quickly eradicating all the old things, including the old manners, the old manners, the old clothes, the old food and the old expressions. In a sense, this makes us have too many desires and too little emotion, too much longing and too little memory, and all of us have become cultural orphans who have lost their mothers. However, people are people after all. Human emotions will always be tenaciously resurrected, and I do not know when the emotional seeds of hibernation will break through the ground and grow. Perhaps, some kind of cultural nostalgia among urbanites is just because the merchants are sensitively aware of the commercial value of emotions, quickly take over the emotions, develop them quickly, and promote the desire, commercialization, and consumption of emotions. They are not only producing expensive blue bricks, but are also selling expensive calligraphy and painting, plaques, antiques, tea houses, courtyard houses, Ming-style furniture, etc., turning the cultural mother into a noble lady or queen in ancient costumes at a high price, forcing those who wish to return home The prodigal sons paid the bill one by one. For the losers in the market, this is of course a double whammy: not only do they have no right to fulfill their desires, but they also lose their right to emotional memory, so they can only stand outside the price barrier and cannot get close to the expensive "mother".