The so-called reading is to let people get free, let the work get free. If a person only reads books in his whole life, it means that he has not actually read books.
Text/Liang Wendao
To borrow the words of the French thinker Blanqui: the so-called reading is to let people get free, let the work get free. Why? Almost every one of us has this experience when we read books, and you will find that some books are unreadable, difficult to access, and difficult to enter. I think it's reading in the real, strict sense. If a person only reads books in his whole life, it means that he has not actually read books. Why? If you think about it, when we learn to recognize words from a young age, when we read the first book, it is difficult, and we all climb step by step.
Why, after we're teenagers, we suddenly don't have to have difficulties, just look at something I can understand. Looking at something you can understand is tantamount to reliving what you already know, which is silly. I advise you to look carefully at the many bestsellers, especially those that are not fictional and non-literary.
For example, there was once a best-selling book "The World is Flat", everyone knows this book, right? Written by Friedman, a popular and well-known columnist at The New York Times, this book is the most typical, non-fiction bestseller, and it has the characteristics of the most successful bestseller. The first is to use a sensational title, theory, or concept, such as "The world is flat." "The world is round" everyone knows, but he said "the world is flat", why is the world flat? He said that because today's globalization has put the whole world on the plane, China, India and the United States were originally so far away countries, but now these three places can compete in some industries. A software engineer does a good job in the United States, but his current job is casually transferred to India and China, which is called the world is flat.
Frankly speaking, this concept is actually known to all of us, we read the news and newspapers every day, and we all know about globalization. This is just one aspect of globalization, and it's a simple truth. But this author knows how to write it out with a very good name, that is, "The World is Flat", which will make you frightened. You feel like you're looking at something very fresh. After reading it, you think he is very reasonable, very right, he said so new things I actually think is very reasonable, and I can understand, this time you are very happy.
Why? Because you know you learn something you don't know, but why do you understand it? In fact, you already know what he said, he said it another way, so you think you didn't know it in the past. You see things so easily and briskly that you thought you didn't know in the past, so you're particularly proud and proud — well, I'm smart too! Deep down, subconsciously, I feel that I am a wise, shrewd, excellent, skilled reader.
So we summarize that there are three rules for bestsellers:
The first law is to repeat what you already know in terms of what you don't know; the second law is to repeat what you just said and give some more examples; the third law is to repeat it again and summarize it, and you succeed — this is the bestseller.
So for me it's not really reading in the strict sense, and reading in the real strict sense is always difficult. The difficulty is that we will find a work, whether fictional or non-fictional, or a philosophical theoretical classic—such as Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, or the great literary work Remembrance of Watery Years. When we read these works, we hope to organize them into organic things, to read out a meaning, to read out a world that I can understand and grasp.
But you find that this work is resisting this desire and demand of you, and the whole process of reading is actually a struggle, you want to put something on it, make it understandable, give it a framework, a format, a pattern, but it has been resisting. You've just built a castle with a complete structure, and the corner side of the wall starts to grow vines again, and then slowly storms the wall — reading is always the way it should be.
At this point you will find that reading is nothing more than a discovery of our own tenacious will and the invincibility of the work itself. The work is free, in the process of reading you find that it cannot be tamed; you are also free, because you are fully aware of the existence of your own will, your own soul. You finish a very difficult book, you can't say you understand it all, but your depth is expanded, as if after a long struggle, such a struggle is like doing a very intense sport - mental physical exercise, so that you as a person are transformed.
Philosophers of the Greco-Roman period placed a great emphasis on reading. They used a word, "drill." When you have time, you can look at plato's Dialogues, or even works that are considered systematic—Aristotle's The Ethics of Nicomach, and so on. You will find that these works seem to be very systematic on the surface, but in fact they are not. It even has a lot of inherent contradictions, because in the process of writing, the author already has an implicit interlocutor, constantly talking to the reader. The so-called careful reading is that you have a dialogue with this work, and in the process of dialogue you cannot conquer it, it cannot conquer you, and then you and this work together reach a height, and then you are slowly changed - the book will always change people.
