Follow inner voice

When I saw the book The Moon and Sixpence on the shelf, I was so excited because I had heard of the book and its famous sentence “It was sixpence all over the floor, but he looked up and saw the moon” a long time ago. When I read over, I was profoundly shocked by this great work and its philosophy contained. The novel deeply discussed the contradiction and interaction of life and art which is still of guiding significance today and it seems exactly to be a kind of magic that fascinates me. The novel is created by W.S.Maugham, a renowned English novelist and dramatist, who had a pathetic childhood. Under the age of ten, his parents passed away successively, so he had to live with uncle. Because of short stature and sever stuttering, he was frequently tortured and bullied by others, which cast a shadow of pain on his tender heart.The lonely childhood cultivated his withdrawn, sensitive and introverted character but made him sympathetic and undaunted in the same time. As he grew up, he wrote multiple novels all of which were significantly influenced by his experiences in youth. This novel is then one of those works. The hero of this novel, Strickland, was a stockbroker working in London with a satisfactory marriage and affluent family. However, he ran away from home and headed for Paris without even a farewell in the seventeenth year after marriage.When all of the rumors guessed he abandoned his career and family because of an affair, people found out that it's just his fanaticism for drawing. He kept leading a vagrant life and finally drifted to Tahiti where he married an Aboriginal girl. He was isolated from the world without care but only fanatically pursued the art of painting. Finally, he died from leprosy . Strickland's story is absurd but full of practical significance. It happens in almost every corner of the world and staged in almost everyone. We are all ordinary, so how to deal with the contradiction between ideal and reality and how to find ourselves in the dull life are the problems facing everyone. There is a saying that goes, "Life is not just about survival, but poetry and distance".But the trivialities of life often make our mind dull. We gradually lose in the mediocre life, and forget the dream and pursuit. At this time, finding our lost self and listening to our inner voice are the primary concern. From where I stand, sixpence is the trivia of life, and the moon is our inner voice. The process from bowing to looking up and from wandering in front of the eyes to poetry and distance may be full of hardships accompanied by others' incomprehension and ridicule. But for ourselves, it is indispensable and full of value. And there is no doubt that Strickland is the one who followed his inner voice and pursued his dream. “It was sixpence all over the floor, but he looked up and saw the moon”. Although life is full of trivialities, we should still listen to our inner voice and pursue our dreams.