Happiness of Reading

To read is to create a blackhole in the universe to host your soul and is to create a virtual reality beyond your life. TV does a better job than books in doing the latter job, but it can never replace books in terms of satisfying the thirsty of one’s mind for knowledge and for companionship. To read is to walk through the shadow of the ignorance and it smoothes one’s feeling. In more or less the same manner, it helps you to cross the lines and to experience what you can never experience in your life time.

I have not read a single piece of short story for a long while. Not surprisingly, I almost forget how juicy and tasteful it is to read such a wonderful story in five minutes, try to recall the story in the next couple of days, and can not help thinking about it several years in line. Some stories speak for themselves and others need a lot of imagination, and still others I have to wait for couple of years to understand, such as Kafka’s In the Penal Colony and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Throughout the school years, I befriend with many books and authors: the long novels strike me as full-fledged symphony, but the short stories are delicate and playful genres with endless potential.

In the long and ruthlessly boring hours of trip to Niagara Falls, I opened a book of short stories by Truman Capote and all the joy of reading came back to me. The opening, The Walls are Cold, is a wonderful screenplay. Capote was so careful in choosing words to create this flamboyant snapshot of a pre-war scenario, with its shining crystal quality of emptiness and weightless. Then he gave a real master performance in telling a story of a small town boy from south in The Jag of Silver. Appleseed, the incredible poor but loving brother of his sister Middy, went out a repeated journey to win a lottery and to buy his sister a fake teeth-set. Aside from the prosaic narrative of the story, Capote can not help adding a satirical ending to the story: nobody believes in miracle anymore, not in this life. In Miriam, the aging Miriam met a strangely behaving young girl with same name. The girl ran into Miriam’s eventless life without any mercy and commanded everything of her life. The truth was nobody excepted Miriam could see this girl and the girl was a creature of her imagination, an encounter with her youth.