The more one goes down the river, the more mediocre and vulgar he may become, and the more he swims against the current, the more elegant this person may be. Each of us, no matter how ordinary, has the nature of pursuing excellence and pursuing excellence, and under such a nature, reading more good books is a correct choice.
People are actually very short
It is raised by a book
Text | Wang Renbo
Source | Prophet's Bookstore
01
Interesting is the real existence of people
Fun, commonly known as fun.
A funny person, an interesting person, he will bring a lot of effects, for example, he may close the distance between us, because our society is full of indifference, full of suspicion, so interesting can close our distance, and at the same time can produce a sense of affinity and closeness between people.
An interesting person may be prone to trust, or be able to establish a sense of trust, which is difficult to establish if one is reticent and may be considered deep or unfathomable in the city.
Fun and playfulness are a very important source of trust, which is a by-product of fun and playfulness.
In fact, fun and fun do not lie in these, interesting, fun should be regarded as a way for people to really exist.
I think there are two sources of fun and amusing: one is genetics, and a person who lives in a family full of humor will more or less carry genetic genes; but the other, more importantly, may be acquired acquisition, and this way of learning is acquired reading.
Reading will make people happy, and reading itself is a kind of fun, the key lies in what kind of book you choose, what kind of reading. Reading is very important for the cultivation of a person's interest.
So, being funny and playful may have an intrinsic connection to reading, and today's topic cuts in from this place.
02
It was the best of times
It was also the worst of times
I think that being a reader and the object we read, the book, in our time, has two results, or to put it bluntly, to borrow someone else's words, the book and the reader have encountered the best of times, and at the same time the worst of times.
Why is it best? With the development of science and technology, our books are becoming more and more exquisite, the spread of books is becoming more and more rapid, and our readers or readers, this group of people is getting bigger and bigger, the scope is getting bigger and bigger, and the crowd is getting wider and wider.
In the past, we said how much culture and heaviness traditional Chinese society is, but we know that the rate of dropout in traditional Chinese society is very low, the so-called reading is the scholar class or the reader, now it is different, each of us may become a reader, so this has created a good era.
But at the same time, the worst of times, how bad is it? Now I don't know what a book is, before we all understood what a book is, but in the postmodern society, our concept of a book has become blurred, and we don't know what a reader is.
So how did this situation come about? In fact, just a few young colleagues and friends have talked about the fact that the mobile Internet has brought such a result - the concept of books is blurred.
For example, I have a reader in my hand, no matter how many good books are stored in this reader, but I think it is not a book, it is an electronic product, and we cannot establish a conceptual connection between it and the book, so we blur the concept of the book.
Traditional reading has become a way of watching. Now it is not called "reading", it is called "reading", "reading" brings us convenience, anytime, anywhere. Like the classmate just said, in the subway, on public transportation, we can take out a mobile phone at will to look at it.
I am not saying that this kind of "watching" has no value, it may be the opposite, it is a symptom of modern society, that is, mass culture, fast food culture. We miss the traditional paper book, a memory of the beautiful reading experience of the past, and although we have many dissatisfactions with such a way of viewing, this trend seems to be irresistible, and we are just complaining.
Moreover, this way of watching, I think it provides us with the main value of "emotion" and "feeling". People become very emotional and irrational, and I think there is something to do with this way of looking.
Of course, the biggest drawback of this way of watching is that it is easy to forget, so in an internet era, "knowledge does not stay overnight", which is a big feature of it. Yesterday in the WeChat circle may have swiped a message, a text, after one night, the next day disappeared.
Well, such a view, this way of reading, the way of value it provides is to provide a point of view, to provide a position, it does not make a detailed statement and argument.
Therefore, through the Internet, we find that society is full of hostility and resentment, and people become restless.
This kind of reading does bring such negative value, so I think reading may have to return to the traditional concept of paper books.
03
Why read a paper book?
Books are good or bad, readers are high and low, which is a very normal phenomenon, but a real reader, I think he certainly does not hold a mobile phone every day.
"Reading is a way of life", to be an interesting person, you must first return to the traditional, classical way of reading, reading paper books.
Paper books give us a lot of fun that we may not care much about. Every book leaves a lot of blank space, because the reader will have a lot of confusion when reading a good book.
So a person who can read, who can read, he often has a pen in his hand, or this pen is right next to him, and he fills in the blank space of all the confusion and the gains.
It's a joy in itself, or the joy of reading, that we miss so much. E-books, no matter how convenient, don't have that experience.
So, "back to the paper book", being an interesting person, the two are interrelated.
Reading a paper book can lead to three different and unexpected results.
First, reading allows us to cultivate a "gentle rationality."
Reading can make people quiet, and I believe that holding a book in your hand and shaking your fist are completely different.
Society is full of hostility, probably because we lack the experience of deep reading, and deep reading may make people mild. The purpose of reading, although we can not set such a purpose, but the more the book is read, it naturally grows a temperament, which I call "gentle reason."
We lack moderation, we lack Sven. I dare not say that our time is Sven sweeping, but our lack of Sven, probably everyone feels, the lack of Sven makes us "teachers are not like teachers", "students are not like students", and the pursuit of elegance is called dress.
So why is vulgar not dressing, elegant or pretending? I do not understand such a judgment so far, as if elegance is all pretended, and vulgarity is human nature.
Second, reading may give us a sense of patience.
I think one of the biggest characteristics of modern people is to lose patience, we always want to have a hole in the sky to drop money, so we become a multi-millionaire, we lose patience and patience with anything, the pursuit of overnight riches, overnight fame,
And reading makes us calm down and wait for that patience. Every one of us, every reader, must keep our own patience, if we extend our patience and patience further, that is, we must keep our own loneliness, and a person who cannot bear loneliness will definitely lose patience.
Third, I think reading traditional paper books slows us down.
Reading itself is a slow process, in the process of reading we will establish rich associations, to find the joy of reading, to find the poetry of reading.
From this point of view, reading books is never a statistical act, such as reading 1,000 books a year, and I think such a goal is meaningless. Reading itself is a slow job, and reading can make us slow down such a fast-paced pace and anxious pace.
The phrase "slowly swallowing" seems to be an irony, a rebellion against a fast-paced society like ours. If the tradition is lost, we lose ourselves, and reading allows us to retain a copy of the classics.
A real person should be a person who lives both in the modern and the past, in a state between tradition and modernity.
So reading paper books may end up giving us these three unintended goals. We definitely do not read books for the sake of patience, nor to slow down to read, nor to cultivate a gentle rationality to read, but reading will produce such an unexpected effect.
The so-called "become a better person", I will play again - is to be an interesting person.
04
I like to hang out
And the fun has to do with the way we read. We call reading "the encounter between man and the book," which is actually the encounter between man's loneliness outside of time and with another self.
People are born lonely, people are born bored, so we often use reading to dispel and dismiss loneliness, so reading style is very important.
Under the society of modernity, it is more of a "technical reading", in order to improve ourselves, in order to get a certificate, to get a degree, often with such a purpose to read.
I call this "technical reading." In addition to the positive value of technical reading, one of the biggest negative values is to dissolve the pleasure of reading, so that we have a fear and boredom of reading.
I often see my students taking the judicial exam, and every day I take a tutoring material and cross it over, and I frown and face it.
We all have this experience, the college entrance examination has a lot of mathematical and physical counseling materials, we are reading those objects and going to college, and at the same time the college entrance examination has changed our fate, but later think about it, it does have a dissolution effect on later reading.
In addition to technical reading, reading as a pleasure should be casual reading, free reading, and not reading a book with a noble goal of ethics and morality. You want to read, read whatever books you want.
One of the best ways to read is to hang out.
Wandering is a state of existence that may be turned around in a crowded place and pushed by the crowd, wandering is in the middle of the night, you hang out in the pages, turn east and west, look east and west, look at a literary book, read a philosophical book, just hang out in the pages.
This is the most important way for me to "nightlife", and of course I also watch images and listen to sounds, and I define myself as a wanderer.
This kind of fragmented wandering reading may feel aimless and goalless, but everyone should believe that our brain has the function of decongesting, you hang out more, read more miscellaneous books, and eventually cultivate it into a kind of learning, cultivation, and temperament through the processing of the brain, so I think that idle reading itself is a kind of poetic thinking.
A person fixed on an object, I think lack of fun. To be a reader, first of all a wanderer, reading is a lazy way of looking east and west, and our pleasure comes from this.
Of course, in the process of reading, we will definitely choose those books that have the cultivation value and cultivation effect of our nature.
A person who has read a classic book and a person who often reads the novels of beautiful writers on the Internet, the temperament of the two is definitely not the same.
The more one goes down the river, the more mediocre and vulgar he may become, and the more he swims against the current, the more elegant this person may be. Each of us, no matter how ordinary, has the nature of pursuing excellence and pursuing excellence, and under such a nature, reading more good books is a correct choice.
The last thing I want to say is that reading makes you a better person, and reading makes you a funny person, a fun person.
Mr. Wang Renbo, a jurist with deep humanistic feelings and critical spirit, is an interesting and wandering person, in addition to the knowledge of the past and the present, he is also an all-round player in painting, music and photography.
He likes to read casually, often lingering in philosophy, political science, Chinese and foreign history, and integrating these into one furnace, often appearing a little ahead of the legal profession. The panoramic vision cultivated by "wandering" reading, coupled with the professional skills of constitutional law, gives him a completely different historical perspective: to intertwine the constitution and history.
In today's popular "historical fever", some books pursue "historical conspiracies" and some books pursue "history has a map and a truth". But there are always books that stubbornly interrogate "the real questions of history" and reconnect big events, big people, and important ideas with real questions. Teacher Wang Renbo undoubtedly belongs to the latter.