People in the academy, it is your duty to read, of course you have to read more. We are not like the ancients. Confucius was a learned man, but he had never read many books – not many books at that time. I’m afraid they had every word of what they called reading in their heads. Now, even in a small field, there are countless books to read. However, different professions require different amounts of reading. If you’re a researcher of Tang history, the more you read about the Tang dynasty, the better. You’re a mathematician, you don’t have to read that much math. Einstein said, “I need only two things: a piece of paper and a pencil. We philosophers are somewhere in between.
It may not work if people in the academy read too little. But there are so many good books in the world that no one can talk about them. Today, tens of thousands of books are printed every year, and it is certainly impossible for anyone to read that many. In addition to reading, we have to learn foreign languages, mathematics, and biology, and we don’t have much time to read ancient books, like the ones in Dream of the Red Chamber, where the girls of a few years old used so many allusions to poems, wine orders, and jokes. When the little aunt was cleaning the study, she asked, “Brother, you have so many books, can you finish them all? I said, “I can’t finish reading. “There is a limit to my life and a limit to my learning.” At my age, I have to pick and choose what I want to read. When I was young, I had a habit of reading the first ten pages of a book, no matter if it was good or bad, and then I had to finish it. It was also because there were so few books at that time, and when I could catch a book, I would read it to death. Now there are too many books, but it took a long time to get rid of the habit. Nowadays, I mostly read several books at the same time, and when I have a good brain, I read hard books, and when I don’t have a good brain, I read easy books, and I read only a few dozen pages of a book at a time, and the next day I will have a fresh feeling when I continue to read it.
When you do research, you have to read. What about outside the profession? Some people are more interested in reading history, some in literature, and some in science. I think the first thing is to read good books, life is limited. You have to read a good book, an intellectual book, a thoughtful book. It’s not like doing research, where you have to read a lot of second-hand and third-hand information in order to write a paper, and it’s not as much fun. If, unfortunately, your major is Chinese literature in the 1950s and 1960s, you have to read boring books all day and night. Reading is a bit like making friends, of course, you have to pick interesting and informative people to make friends with, but if you want to make friends with them, they may not take care of you, which is not as good as reading.
Finally, why should we read? The great wise man has said a lot, so I will just add my personal experience. I don’t want to talk about reading in terms of nobility or anything else. The Song and Ming dynasties loved reading more than we do, not necessarily because they were more noble than we are. It is connected with the social situation. They had no movies, no TV, no WeChat, so what could they do but study? At that time, they had to rely on reading to be an official, of course he studied well, we study books is useless, not learning to be a great official, then of course, we study less. If you want to know, you have to do empirical research. You students in sociology can really make this a research project. I personally love to read, and at the same time more noble, but I do not know whether reading makes me noble or noble makes me read, perhaps I am a person who happens to love reading and noble at the same time. There are quite a few people who have read less than me but are more noble than me. I don’t know whether reading makes people good or not, but we need to do empirical research on this as well. We know that some bad people read a lot, and I can list a few names that we all know.
You think you are smart, you read Feynman and you know you are as good as a fool, you think you are erudite, you read Jacques Barzan and you know what it means to be erudite. Books are not like oral traditions, two thousand years old and new, you want to know who thought what, who said what, you go to the library, you take out a book, Confucius is not far from you, Aristotle is not far from you, Galileo is not far from you, you are directly face to face with the greatest mind and intellect that has ever been produced by man, right on the same desk. The book takes you two thousand years ago, takes you to the ancient sites of the Middle East and the jungles of the Americas, takes you to the Big Bang, takes you into the double helix. The world is infinite, and we have to travel on the wings of a book. It’s also a kind of transcendence. Life is full of trivial things, and when you’re done with all that crap, you read your favorite book, a volume in your hand, and you forget all about it.
Although the reading-led era or the text-led era has passed, and although we are no longer traditional readers, but since we are fortunate enough to be college students and graduate students, I think we should still be more or less alive with a little bit of a reader’s side, or a little bit of reading habits. We all know that in the world, Chinese people’s reading ranking is very low, and I hope that your generation will raise the ranking a little bit.
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