Reading is the use of language and words to obtain information, understand the world, develop thinking, and obtain aesthetic experience. Many people regard reading as "pleasant reading" and regard reading as a happy thing. In particular, independent reading, you can choose your favorite themes and authors, cultivate sentiments through reading, gain experience, enhance self-cultivation, pursue spiritual satisfaction and happiness, and harvest the joy of reading.
Influenced by my elders, I have loved to read since I was a child, read a lot of books, and accumulated certain reading experience, often feeling the unique joy of reading. But when it comes to my most memorable reading, it was a nightmarish and painful reading.
In August 2019, I went to Beijing for a training. One night before the end of the training, I went to the Asian Games Village Book Building alone to buy books. Enter the bookstore and look through the rows of shelves, dazzling with the variety of books. Suddenly, a chic rose-red cover book caught my eye. "The Poetics of Dreams", which is a very poetic title, the illustrations on the cover are also very interesting. A closer look at the cover text is the "French Thought and Culture Series" of the Triptych Bookstore, written by Gaston Bashra and translated by Liu Ziqiang. Since the book is plastic, it is impossible to open it to read the contents. So I turned the book over, and on the pink back cover were two white passages—"Bashira has always permeated the idea of dreams and poetry, and in this book he further introduces phenomenological methods into imagination and poetics." He emphasizes the epistemological value of imagination and imagery, arguing that they are the precursor to the future: any conscious realization is an increase in consciousness, a growth in light, a strengthening of psychological coherence..."
Well, yes, very interesting, that's it. So I hurried to the cashier to pay, packed the book, and left satisfied. When I arrived at the hotel, I opened "The Poetics of Dreams" with great enthusiasm, not wanting to start an unforgettable nightmarish and painful reading.
And a short excerpt is taken at random: "According to the principles of phenomenology, the problem is to fully elucidate the epiphany that arises through the image of the poem to the admirable subject." This conscious understanding of which modern phenomenology seeks to impose on all mental phenomena adds to, in our view, an enduring subjective value to certain images of objectivity, which are often only unreliable and fleeting... The psychologist's description certainly provides some literature, but phenomenologists should place it on the axis of intentionality..."
Difficult and obscure, full of profound philosophical meaning, unfamiliar phenomenal language, coupled with the translated Westernized language, almost every sentence has to be chewed and carefully pondered, making my reading slow and painful. As the reading gradually deepened, the pain became deeper and deeper, and many of the author's expressions seemed to me to be able to achieve at most a half-understanding or even a little understanding, "How can there be such a difficult book!" "I angrily threw the book on the bed, suppressed the anger in my heart, swam to the window, looked at the calm night outside the window, and calmed myself...
At the end of the training, I returned to the unit, and as long as I had time in the evening, I picked up "The Poetics of Dreams" and began to read painfully, and the book became slower and slower, and I read about ten pages in one night. Often picking up a book to read one or two pages, I have to put the book down, like a failed trapped beast, walking around the dormitory, walking for a few minutes, taking a breath, and then reading with a painful sigh. When I got home on the weekend, I took the book back to read with my family and couldn't help but sigh as I read it. My son looked at me with strange eyes and asked in amazement, "Daddy, what book are you reading that makes you feel so bad?" I shook my head and handed him the book directly, and my son, who was in the second year of junior high school, casually looked through it for a few minutes and sighed: "I can't understand it, I can't understand it, my brain shell hurts a lot!" Dad, don't look at it either! "Your father is using a book to 'cross the robbery'", while reading Xiu Xian's novel with his mobile phone, his wife laughed, "After reading it, he will 'become an immortal'."
Jokes aside, I had a sudden thought: "The Poetics of Dreams" is a difficult book, what do others think? Are you also suffering from reading like me? So use the mobile phone Baidu a bit, do not want to whether it is "Douban Reading" or "Jingdong Books", many people have a high evaluation of this book, in addition to a very few think that they can not understand, most people think that they have benefited a lot, large paragraphs of emotion (of course, many are excerpts from the original text), unlimited appreciation of the sentence, happy reading experience overflowing between the lines. It made me even more amazed: Are these people reading books on the Internet all gods?! I am also a graduate of Chinese language and literature, why is the gap so big? At one point, I had serious doubts about my ability to read, understand, and even my intellect... Am I degenerating? Can't keep up with the times?
It is said that reading is a thought process of understanding, comprehending, absorbing, appreciating, evaluating, and exploring articles, but I seem to have failed to meet any of them in this unprecedented reading. During that time, even dreams often dreamed of reading "The Poetics of Dreams", entangled between the masculine "Animus" and the negative "Anima", the esoteric words floating in front of the eyes, and the familiar Chinese characters became so separated, reading straight sweaty and painful, making reading a nightmare in the true sense...
But no matter how painful and difficult it is, after all, it is only the reading of words, and I still insisted on it, and gradually experienced the pleasure and harvest of reading in my persistence. As I saw earlier, "But whatever you think is easy to see, most of the things mentioned above are what you know." And books that you read very laboriously or disagree with can make you learn more."
It took 17 days to read the 285 pages of "The Poetics of Dreams" and finally ended a painful reading. The moment I closed the book, my mood was mixed, and there was a hint of loss and reluctance. I recorded in my WeChat "Reading Notes" that this book is profound and obscure, and it is the most difficult book I have ever read, not only reading every paragraph of pain, but even every sentence of pain. After spending 17 days reading it, I was relieved, gained, painful and happy.
After reading "The Poetics of Dreams", my reading mood also changed a lot: remind myself to try to maintain the "ability to read hard" and not let it degenerate with age. Reading is no longer so impatient, know how to slow down, dive down, know how to appreciate what you didn't like before, or even turned away.
Perhaps, painful reading is also a kind of practice.
(Author: Zhou Yangsong /Zunyi Municipal Taxation Bureau, State Administration of Taxation)
Editor: Yang Wen Review: Li Wei
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