Commentator: Qiu Yanbo
You don't have to wait until World Book Day to read a book.
Reading, like morning dew and spring rain sprinkling fields, should be the normal state of life and spiritual nourishment, not an ornament for a specific festival, nor a temporary conversation on social platforms. The absurdity of picking up dusty books only on "Reading Day" is as if a farmer only thinks of plowing on "Sowing Day" and a fisherman sets sail on "Fishing Day".
Huang Tingjian once said: If you don't read for one day, you will be born in the dust, if you don't read for two days, your speech will be boring, and if you don't read for three days, your face will be hateful. The abomination of the face does not only refer to the ugliness of the appearance, but also to the lack of spirit and barren thoughts.
Reading is like a stream flowing into the river and sea, a stone mill grinds grains, and through the absorption of knowledge and the collision of wisdom, the individual can be enriched, sharpened and sublimated.
Some people don't usually read books, but when it comes to World Book Day, they talk about reading, reposting various articles about reading on social platforms, and treating reading as a festival-limited ritual. What is the significance of such "reading"? Reading was originally meant to sharpen and sublimate life, but now it has become an annual luxury.
The value of reading lies not only in the improvement of personal accomplishment, but also in the inheritance and progress of social civilization. Books are the crystallization of human wisdom, the witness of history, and the carrier of culture. The reading of each book is a look back at history, a tribute to wisdom, and the inheritance of culture. If people only touch these treasures of wisdom on "Reading Day", it is tantamount to turning a blind eye to the bright cultural starry sky, and only opening the skylight at a certain moment to glimpse the fleeting starlight. With such an attitude towards knowledge, how can we hope for the sustained prosperity of social civilization and the in-depth excavation of human wisdom?
The original intention of "Book Day" is to awaken people's attention and love for reading, but its significance must not stop there. It should be a passionate clarion call for people to return to their daily routines, and to make reading a part of their lives, as natural and necessary as eating and drinking.
Only when reading is integrated into daily life and becomes a habit, an attitude, and a way of life, can the knowledge power contained in it be truly released, and the cultural value it carries can be effectively inherited.
The French philosopher Diderot said, "He who does not read, the mind stops." Today, we might as well ask ourselves: Have we made reading just an embellishment of "Reading Day", and ignored its power to shape the normalcy of life?
Reading is not only a reading day, but also the dawn of the day, the fall of the night, and the wind, frost, rain and snow of life, and the cycle of the four seasons.
Let reading become the background color of life and the habit of thinking, so that we can live up to the sentence "poetry and books in the belly", and let the light of wisdom illuminate every corner of life.
Reading is not a holiday limit, it should be a daily routine.
Let reading be integrated into daily life, like salt into water, silent and nourishing, like a lamp shining at night, glimmering and bright.