Talking about reading at the Reading Festival
Text: An Luoduo
1. Quitting halfway through reading
I read a lot, but most of them quit halfway. Like a cow chewing its cud, it is even more rare. Then in the third year of life, it is like a rice bag and a straw bag, accomplishing nothing. When ordinary people read, they are bound to be biased. It is like cutting through a wall to gain light. Using their poor little heads to think about the infinite universe, they must be able to see only a small part of the world. But this truth is so great. Even if you and I only get a glimpse of the mystery, it is like a dragon entering the sea or a tiger returning to the mountain. It seems extraordinary. He seems to be extraordinary, which is also called pretentious. This is like the king in a drama. Before the curtain ends, he seems to be the real king. Life is like a play, or life is like a dream. This dream never ends. What is the difference between being pretentious and being truly extraordinary?
Talking about reading, I had a kind of confusion buried in my stomach, tortured every day, and difficult to digest: why is it easy to give up halfway when reading, and it is rare to read in a hurry, and most of them are boring, even though I know that good books are good. Read often but don’t want to read it again?
When I am in a bad mood, I like to read some scribbled sentences and imagine random Internet articles to pass the time. I read it heartily at the beginning, and got in without sleep and food, and separated from life. I really "hid in the small building and became one, and didn't care about spring, summer, autumn and winter." The worries of the world are isolated in a short period of time, and I think of annoying things while reading. , there is a sense of detachment that "there are no years in the mountains, but thousands of years have passed in the world".
It is said that love, chocolate, and drugs have three common characteristics, that is, they all stimulate the secretion of dopamine, allowing people to feel happy. So, this kind of detachment and detachment when reading is probably the same reason - it makes people excited and happy.
If this kind of enjoyable online article is interrupted by trivial matters and stops reading suddenly, then if you pick it up again after three or five days, it will suddenly become useless. If you read it, it will feel like you are separated by mountains and rivers; if you don’t read it, you will be reluctant to let go of the pleasure you had before. This is like meeting old friends. After excitedly reminiscing about old times, there is no new topic, and embarrassment begins to accumulate.
The pleasure of reading online articles comes from detachment and detachment, from the novel experience of thinking about entering a new world. Once this kind of thinking is interrupted, the imaginary world will collapse within a few days, and the effort and effort to build it again will feel like useless.
There are many similar experiences in life: on an ordinary day, you did something ordinary, and later you were surprised to find that it was an important turning point in your life. Yes, mortal calculations are all trivial matters after all. When the time comes, we often don’t know that we are standing at a crossroads. That is to say, when faced with a choice, we just act numbly and rely on habit. When will we understand? It’s when plans collapse, when relationships break up, when things are broken and there’s no way to repair them, when things are so bad that there’s no way to undo it, that’s when the old world built by your thinking collapses, and you realize as if you’ve had a sudden enlightenment: It turns out. Life is like a play, it turns out that life is like a dream, it turns out that there is life beyond novels, it turns out that the old has passed, and there is still a new life to look forward to.
So why is it easy to give up halfway when studying? Before you meet someone, you have met countless people, but you feel that he is pleasing to your eye, so you say that you have met him. This is called encounter, and it is also called choosing a book. You and he fall in love at first sight, get to know each other, and grow old together. This is called finding the right person, and it is also called finding a good book. Your whole life with him is not enough. You have agreed to live with each other for three lives. This is called finding the person in your destiny, and it is also called finding a classic. But like most loves in this world, the people you often meet and the books you often choose are not as beautiful as they were at the beginning, and they often end up halfway. But since giving up on love halfway is regarded as life experience and memory, then giving up on reading is not so bad, but also becomes the nutrition of life.
2. Reading is not important
Reading is not important, at least not more important than cooking. Reading in the pure sense (excluding textbooks, reference books, magazines, etc.) pursues Malos’s fifth need in life—the need for self-realization.
So since ancient times, some people have complained: a person who is useless is a scholar. From the perspective of life, you cannot see how important reading is to the stability and development of society in the few decades a person can experience.
In fact, a person who can only read will be very useless.
Studying is not noble. The ancients said that the poor are rich in literature and martial arts, so martial arts training requires venues, facilities, teachers and medicinal materials. If the poor want to get ahead, the best way is to study. What will you do after reading? The best result is "sold to the emperor's family". Moreover, this is a routine for reading textbooks, taking college entrance exams, and becoming a civil servant. According to the current narrow definition of "study", it cannot be regarded as studying. So from ancient times to the present, what is the situation of scholars as we define them now? There are people like Tao Yuanming who live in seclusion and work as farmers, people like Tang Bohu who are cynical and play with the world, and people like Liu Yong who hang out in the flower streets and fall into the world. These are all people who do not regard reading as a shame, and do not use it to manage the world, but do it for their own sake. people. In a secular sense, it is indeed "useless". At least it's not noble, right?
Occasionally, guests come to my house and see the bookcase in my living room and ask:
Can you finish reading all the books you bought? This is a question asked by people who don’t buy books.
You have read so many books, can you remember them? This is a question asked by people who don’t read.
To be honest, the more you read, the more you realize your ignorance. Besides, I read too little.
The importance of reading does not lie in reading. Reading is not more advanced than watching TV, listening to music or dancing in the square. The wonderful thing about reading is that it is the most suitable form of information collection that triggers people to think. Now we are talking about poetry and distance, reading and traveling. This is just like giving an overview in school and buying equipment first when baking. It is the way to the "Tao", not the "Tao" itself. Too many people mistakenly believe that the more they study, the more knowledgeable they will be, and the more they travel, the more knowledgeable they will be. This is like saying that once you have baking equipment, materials, and recipes, you will have a delicious cake. Everything is ready, but you still have to wait for the east wind. Between reading and true knowledge, traveling and gaining insights, the east wind we need is thinking. Reading, traveling or TV dramas, etc., are all ways to obtain thinking materials. Only with thinking materials and thinking can you get truly good things.
So reading is really not important, what is important is thinking.
PS: The city library and a bookstore held a "Reading Marathon" event at the Reading Festival. The original intention was to promote reading. The content was "Read a book in five hours." I proposed Two doubts: First, how to verify that you have finished reading? Secondly, the books that can be read in five hours are mainly light novellas. Is this too limiting? If it is a more advanced book, five hours is only enough to read it once.
Later I felt that I was too serious. No matter what, it is always a good thing if someone organizes and participates.
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