Editor’s Note: This is the speech given by Mr. Tan Perniu at the fifth coming-of-age ceremony of Curionesty College on November 11, 2022, and this speech has been compiled and revised based on the live video. Tan Bo Niu: a scholar of late Qing history, especially dedicated to the history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the history of the Hunan army, and the biography of Zeng Guofan. He is the author of “Battle of Tianjing: A Record of Military and Political Correspondence in the Late Qing Dynasty”, “The Remnants of the World: A History of the Late Qing Dynasty Taken out of Context”, “The Rise of the Hunan Army: A History of the Struggle of Hunan People in the Modern World”, “The Shengshi is Prisoned by Writings”, “The Brightness and Depth of Modern History”, “After all, Who is the First to Achieve Great Results in Battle? Recorded TV lecture “Legend of Hunan Army”. Academic advisor for the documentary film “Record of Xiang Army’s Eastward Expedition” and “Zeng Guofan, a Close Friend”. Reviewer of “Autumn of Heaven”.

I see that some of the five students have met before. First of all, I would like to congratulate them on their first coming-of-age ceremony, and I think they should have a script, but what I am going to say today is not quite the same as the script because coming-of-age is a very real thing, and I would liketo say a few words that are true to life. In my opinion, the word “adult” has two meanings, one is a person and the other is time, and the word “adult” is time, which means that to become an adult is to honor a person in time. And this time we can see that the time we live in today is our time, and we can understand and observe and analyze this time, but how this time became what it is today, we should also understand.
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We know that all people, Chinese, foreigners, yellow people, white people, black people have a common ancestor, that is, he came from Africa, that is to say, in the beginning all people were in the same place, there was no very special development, but to this day we see that there are very big differences in the civilizations, countries, communities, and because of these differences we have wars, alliances, trade, spread of religions. and all this is both for unity and a cause of all the divisions, and this is a big development of our time.Specifically, as Chinese, we have a history of civilization of more than 3,000 years, and the civilization older than ours is about 6,000 years of Egyptian civilization as we know it now, so we are at the back of the list of ancient civilizations, but I personally think that no matter whether it’s the 3,000 years of China’s history of civilization, the 6,000 years of Egypt’s history of civilization, the even shorter history of civilization in the Americas, or the more than 2,000 years of European civilization, they all have a common feature, especially for those who are in this era. They all share a common feature, especially visible to those who are in this era, we are much luckier than a Victorian, we are much luckier than a person in the mid to late Qing Dynasty, and this is the greatest feature of our era.
It is because we are living in the world after the Industrial Revolution, the world before and after the Industrial Revolution are two worlds, just like what Ji Xiao said just now, the world after the Industrial Revolution is a world with light, because there is electricity, human beings have discovered electricity and are able to use it, and in the era after the Industrial Revolution the dissemination of our information and the swiftness of our transportation are far more than that of all the people in the ancient times, and this is the most fortunate thing about the modern people, and this is of course also the This is one of the reasons why modern people are far more anxious than ancient people, whether about physical and mental illnesses or internal and external anxieties.
We modern people can’t find the kind of emotion that the ancient people had, because sincere emotion requires a long period of isolation, a long distance separation, before you can experience it alone with your heart, and emotion is the source of all rationality and sensibility in human beings, and the brewing of emotion is the most important, and it’s also the source of knowledge, but we modern people, because of the industrial revolution, we’ve lost all of that forever.
So I think that the 3,000 years of Chinese history before the Industrial Revolution, and even the 6,000 years of Chinese and Western history, it’s a long cycle, whether it’s the Egyptian elders, or the European monarchs, or the Chinese emperors, essentially they practiced the same kind of system, that is, the system of one family ruling over a large group of people, and all of the ancient civilization and culture is overwhelmingly about how to maintain that rule and how to All ancient civilizations and cultures were largely about how to maintain this rule, and the knowledge that came out of it, and the ancient laws, and the moral requirements were all about this central point, and it was only in this process that the people were able to go and enjoy a little bit of their own happiness as human beings – that’s what I mean by saying that the ancient history was by its very nature a very dark place, and that if we want to look for light in the ancient world, of course there is light, and we can’t say that it’s not there, but it’s not there. If we were to look for light in the ancient world, of course it was there, not to say it wasn’t there, but it took a very good pair of eyes, but the industrial revolution changed all that. Because the industrial revolution allowed a lot of people to receive the same knowledge, the isolation of information became a very difficult thing to do, and because the development of trade also made it very difficult for an isolated monarchy to emerge, then everything needed to change, and these changes have not been accomplished up to now, which means that the coming-of-age ceremony of the new mankind, of the new history, has not come into being, and it would be better for the coming-of-age ceremonies of you five to be able to set a timely Set the date.

We are all in the midst of history, and this is what we are in such a new era, so-called new era that we often talk about, we are going to usher in a big era, this is the big era that we are in, that we are going to meet, and this is a more fortunate moment than many, and of course the big era generally, often, and all the time, means wars, pestilences, tyrannies, and outbursts of culture and art, and a lot of individuals, a lot of specific people inside the big era can ascend to the top, this is not determined what kind of people, can be on the top of that wave, but there are also many people, who, for unknown reasons, will be buried in the middle of the wave.
We, as human beings, we commemorate our birth, we commemorate our growth, but we also have another important thing that we understand that we are in the midst of time. We commemorate our growth and at the same time we usher in our death, which we will get closer to. We are not going to go into unlucky words, but we as rational people should understand this: the important de and not how to commemorate how you die in the future, but that you come to understand what death means to you, and what growth means to you, and that you have this kind of mindset, and that in the process you are really human beings in the midst of time to feel it all.

How do we understand growth, how do we understand people in a time like the present, coming up to huge times as well as people who are in such big times, and that’s the word that precedes what I just said about adulthood inside – time.
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As for human beings, I have just said that in the ancient dark world there was light, at least one kind of light, and both our Eastern sages and our Western predecessors, in some aspects, they were in agreement, for example, the highest kind of enjoyment a human being can pursue in this world, the most difficult kind of knowledge he can pursue, and both of them would agree that it is beauty. The hardest and most pleasurable knowledge one can pursue is beauty. Of course this beauty may be different from the definition of beauty in general school education, and also different from the definition of beauty in various schools, because this beauty is not only artistic and aesthetic beauty, it is a state of human existence and life. And this state of beauty, I’m too late today to explain how I understand the East and West on the composition of this beauty, but I think it has a few key words, you recognize beauty, you create beauty, you need these key words:

The first is honesty. Honesty is not just so that you can get along well with people, it is not so that you can get a good name on earth for not lying, it is only if you are honest with yourself that you can gain real knowledge, what you know, what you don’t know, what you have foreseen, what you would like to forget, what you are able to forget, and what you are not able to forget, all of this makes up your honesty. But this honesty is only within you; we cannot see how a man is honest unless TA shows integrity.
The second is integrity. Integrity is when you gain knowledge with honesty, then when faced with many things, when faced with different situations, you can make your judgment, and you have the ability to make your judgment, which means that you will know what is meant by right and wrong, you will know what should be done and what should not be done, what is wrong and what is right, what has not been done but I want to do it, what has been done What I regretted doing, these are integrity. Of course when you have achieved integrity, you have only made it clear that you are a reasonable person and an insightful person, but at this time you have not yet reached the state of beauty.
The realm of beauty is the third step. In the sense that you have the knowledge that human beings need, the knowledge that you yourself need, in the sense that you know what is right and what is wrong within that knowledge, in such a way that you take that step of your own, that step of your own life, and you become a courageous person, and you go on to really do those things that you think are worthy of being done, that you ought to be doing. Only then do you become a person of beauty, a friend of beauty, and a friend of time.
With these words I hope to be able to give some blessings to five friends who look like they are already sunburned.























