Escaping the World in Books
The world is not a good place, and we often see sad, angry news. Everyday work and life are not pleasant, even very tired, the workplace is not satisfactory, and the emotions are not settled. Many people use reading to escape reality, and when we are immersed in books, reality seems to no longer exist. I also often use reading to escape from reality, temporarily forgetting the real world’s fly camp dog Gou, “I have a long regret that this body is not mine, when will I forget Ying Ying. The night is quiet and the wind is quiet. ”
I like CS Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, who was obsessed with reading when he was a child, thinking that the world in the book is more real than the world outside. Lewis claimed that all the books at home overflowed from the study, and he regarded books as the safest and warmest refuge in the world, able to protect his mind from the misery of life. However, the beautiful world that Louis built in the book collapsed with the death of his mother. Books did not provide him with real refuge, and when he stepped out of his imaginary world, he still had to face this traumatized, painful, heartbreaking world.
If books are just a tool for us to escape the world, then when you are in the study, it seems that you have the power to fight the whole world. But when you walk out of the study, you will find that you are still the cowardly person who can’t do anything. Isn’t this a kind of self-deception? If reading is just escape, how is it different from drug use and indulgence? Isn’t it all about escaping from a mediocre, empty life?
A person who spends an all-night shopping at a shopping festival, and a person who reads a book all night, don’t they come with temporary excitement and fatigue afterwards, and come back with disappointment? Escaping may work, but real-world dilemmas don’t go away by escaping.
Building the World in Books
The world is not perfect, but human beings like to strive for perfection. We use our imagination to portray perfection, allowing us to ignore the imperfections of the world for a while. When we see a semicircle, we must make up a complete circle in our mind. Humans’ pursuit of perfection may be rooted in the depths of the soul. The afterglow of the sunset, the clouds and the clouds, only human beings can think and be moved by this.
When I was young, I liked reading martial arts novels very much, because it catered to my imagination of being a chivalrous person. In real life, I was often bullied. Because I was tall and thin, I was regarded as an outlier by my classmates, and I was also said to have “giant disease”. Although he is tall, he doesn’t know how to play basketball, so he is even more looked down upon. I broke my leg in the first year of junior high school and was nicknamed “crimp”, and this nickname continued until the third year of high school. In martial arts novels, I would imagine myself as a hero who is happy and vindictive.
Many times, we are dissatisfied with reality and turn to the pursuit of perfection in books. But this kind of consummation cannot be completely fictional, and any assumptions in the mind are based on the existence of the real world. Perhaps the pursuit of perfection is our factory setting as human beings, and whenever we encounter imperfection, this instinct is activated to imagine and create a kind of perfection in books. However, imagination is just imagination after all, and the perfection we have achieved in books is still imperfect in the real world. The world isn’t really perfect when you bury your head in the sand of books like an ostrich. This kind of created beauty is not real, and has strong hypocrisy and self-deception.
Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” gave me a deeper appreciation for the self-deception created by this type of writing.
In Britain in the 1930s, the concept of class was still very serious. The owner announced that Leonie Tallis was born into a wealthy family and was an imaginative girl who was good at writing. Thirteen-year-old Tallis fell in love with the housekeeper’s son Robbie, but she also knew that Robbie was in love with her sister. One day, when she saw Robbie and her sister Cecilia transgress, she felt an undercurrent of jealousy, anger, shame, prejudice, and she decided that Robbie was a hooligan. When Cousin Lola was raped, she saw only the dim figure of the criminal in the dark, and she believed without a doubt that it was Robbie. As the only eyewitness, she identified Robbie with great certainty. For this sentence, Robbie was sentenced to prison. She completely ruined the happiness of Robbie and her sister’s life, and she also began a long road of redemption.
What this book made me reflect is that her atonement was done through words. Tallis went on to become a very successful novelist, in which she found relief by creating a fictional reunion between her sister and Robbie. In the end, she made up for the lie with a lie. This fictional story was her real idea, but it was her unfulfilled wish. Words become a moral bubble bath, but can it really atone for sin?
Similar works include Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Days End”, which vividly describes the self-deception of human nature. The Swedish Academy summed up the creative motif of the Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro as “memory, time and self-deception”, and the award speech said: “Kazuo Ishiguro, in the profound excavation of human memory and history, delicately demonstrates This may have a positive side, but it is more likely to deceive oneself.”
I often reflect on myself, when I read a lot of books that reflect war, famine and poverty There will be tears and a sense of moral superiority. I feel empathy for the suffering of others, cry for the stories of others’ suffering, and feel heartbroken for the stories of others’ suffering, and I feel like a moral person, but am I really there? Am I giving real help?
Don McCullin was an outstanding war photojournalist, and he took a picture of a child with albinism in Africa that really struck me. The black child with albinism in the photo is scrawny and dying. And in some parts of Africa, children with albinism are considered demons incarnate. They were persecuted for their superstition and even dismembered for witchcraft. But to be honest, my moving was only momentary, I actually did nothing but a few tears.
Russell said that there are three driving forces in his life: one is the desire for love, the second is the pursuit of knowledge, and the third is the unstoppable sympathy for human suffering. But Russell loves only conceptual humans, not concrete ones. He loves the people and suffers for their suffering, but he remains far away from them; he advocates equality for all, but never gives up his title of earl; he advocates equality between men and women, but in order to have greater sexual freedom to mess around.
Endo Shusaku has a very poignant sentence in the book “Silence”: “Sin is not what ordinary people imagine, such as stealing and lying. The so-called sin refers to one person passing through another person’s life, but forgetting to leave it behind. There are slush claws there.”
If we just create an imaginary world through reading, but are unwilling to enter the real world and care about the real suffering of others in the real world, then this kind of self-deceiving reading is actually Meaningless.
