When the human stars shine

Chapter 2 Preface
No artist will continue to create art 24 hours a day, and those unique and life-infusing brushstrokes are often generated in the rare fleeting flash of inspiration.The same is true of history - which we regard as the greatest actor and poet of all time - it is also impossible for it to innovate all the time without interruption.Although Goethe once referred to history as "God's mysterious workshop" with great admiration, what happened in this mysterious workshop were innumerable, unimportant, and extremely ordinary trivial matters.Here, as everywhere in art and in life, memorable moments are rare.This workshop can only be regarded as a chain that has gone through thousands of years, and those historians have taken the trouble to connect one fact after another as links without any emotion.Because any extraordinary historical moment needs enough time to brew, and every event of great significance has to go through a development process.For a nation, a genius must be assisted by millions of people.A moment of true world significance—a moment of humanity's stars shining before the world, there must be a long time before it will quietly pass away.

However, just as in art, as long as a genius appears, he will be famous forever. Once a historical moment with worldwide significance occurs, it will determine the historical process of decades or even hundreds of years.Just as the tip of a lightning rod strikes the electric currents throughout the atmosphere, so too do events that are too numerous to enumerate tend to come together in the shortest possible time.What usually happens in sequence or in parallel is condensed in such a decisive moment.The decision at this moment has a huge impact on future generations. It can determine the life and death of a person, the rise and fall of a nation, and even the fate of the entire human society.

Such dramatic and life-or-death moments are rare in individual lives and in the evolution of history.This moment sometimes occurs in a certain day, a certain hour, sometimes only in a very short moment, but this decisive influence can transcend time and space.Here, I would like to look back at these specific moments that happened in different time, space and regions—the star shining moment—the reason why I named these moments is because they are like stars, shining brightly in the dark night of human beings!But I don't want to use my slightest fiction, exaggeration or reduction to cover up the internal and external truth of the event, because, at those extraordinary moments, history itself is a complete presentation, and any helper is superfluous.History is the real poet and dramatist, and no writer of any era can surpass it.

Stephen Zweig
(End of this chapter)