The More and More Widely One Reads, the Fewer Things There Are That Cannot Be Let Go

June 16, 2018, the first day of the Dragon Boat Festival long weekend.

At five in the morning I had already washed up, walked from home to the office I rented, which doubles as my study and workshop, practiced the qin for half an hour, and read for a while. I looked up references in preparation for receiving patients who had booked appointments to see me today.

If this had not been the Dragon Boat Festival long weekend, today would be Saturday, and I would be teaching all day.

At seven I walked home from the office, had breakfast, and returned to the office to wait for the first patient I had booked. We had scheduled eight o'clock, and this was her first visit to see me.

At eight-ten she had not arrived. I sent her a message asking where she was, but got no reply. By eight-thirty she still had not come, so I messaged again, still no reply. At nine she had still not arrived, and again there was no response at all.

At nine-thirty I knew that this was another patient who had failed to show up, so I deleted her from WeChat. By around ten, this booked patient once again requested to add me on WeChat, without a word of explanation. I accepted and asked them why they had not come as agreed, but still received no reply.

I had no choice but to tell her on WeChat that behaving this way showed neither basic good faith nor basic courtesy, and that I would no longer accept her as my patient.

Since the patient did not come, my scheduled guqin lesson still had to take place. I told my guqin teacher that she could come give me the lesson at any time that morning, as long as her schedule allowed. At around nine-forty she arrived and gave me the lesson.

When the guqin lesson ended, I was about to go home for lunch, when a patient who had originally booked an afternoon appointment suddenly showed up without notice. This was also his first visit to see me. I was a bit taken aback, but since he had come, I might as well receive him, so I received the couple.

It turned out that the patient said he had only come to scout the place and take a look. In fact he had not really prepared to seek treatment from me; it was his sister-in-law who very much hoped he would come to me for treatment, while the patient himself knew little about me. After occupying about twenty minutes of my time, the patient took his leave.

Because it was a holiday, I had not scheduled many patients today; there were a few long-standing patients with whom I needed to communicate and check on their conditions.

In the afternoon, my wife wanted to take our son and niece to the movies and wanted me to come along. So I brought my Kindle and went to the cinema with them. I had several books in progress on the Kindle, and could read a few pages while waiting for the film to start.

We watched a sequel to Jurassic Park. During the movie, three emergency patients contacted me urgently, asking me to handle their acute conditions.

One was an acute abdominal patient with intestinal obstruction caused by a tumor pressing on the small intestine; her daughter kept saying "I beg you," and her urgency was palpable. Another was a bleeding patient, and a third was a patient who had developed a severe allergic reaction after chemotherapy.

Several other, less serious patients were also contacting me. One patient had pain in the liver area after taking medication and wanted me to look into what was going on. One patient with a puzzling, unexplained condition was at a loss because of tormenting symptoms such as difficulty breathing, and asked for my help. And one late-stage tumor patient, facing an emotional crisis, poured out his grievances to me.

This is a glimpse of my holiday life. Had this been in the past, I would have been broken by so many vexing matters. But now, my inner state can remain unruffled.

I blocked the patient who had no-showed without notice, dealt as gently as I could with the patient who had suddenly turned up for a reconnaissance visit, and calmly saw the visiting couple out. I offered my medical advice to the several critically ill patients. I gave some general advice to those patients who probably did not truly need my help, and told them to seek other doctors.

Then I opened my computer, placed an order on Amazon for three books I had been wanting to buy lately, and then came to write this article.

It has been nearly twenty years since I left university. The institution I am most grateful for is the National Library of China. Since 1999, I have spent most of my time there, reading all kinds of books aimlessly and browsing an extremely broad range. Had it not been for all these years of reading, I do not think I could have coped with everything I encountered today.

Ms. Yang Jiang said that the reason a person is troubled is that he thinks too much and reads too little. If one does the opposite—reading widely and diversely, and thinking less—then one is not easily troubled.

As someone who enjoys reading and writing, in the past I merely liked various articles or books that I thought were wonderfully written, but I did not feel that writing itself had much value.

Now I fully appreciate the value of writing. Had it not been for that group of people who love writing and the wonderful articles they produced, we would have had far fewer things to read, lost a wonderful way to pass the time, and—more importantly—lost much of the nourishment that promotes our mental growth.

I love freedom and have a free-spirited personality. So from middle school on, I refused to be influenced by the heavily utilitarian exam-oriented education; my reading range was extremely broad, and more than half of what I read had nothing to do with school entrance exams. I gave up academic credentials; after dropping out of university, this libertarian tendency became even more thorough. Wherever my interest led, I read whatever I wanted—to hell with degrees and professional titles.

In my view, most of us are educated in a muddled way, and then, because our own souls are so tightly bound, we go on to educate our children in an equally muddled way, until each of us ends up walking down paths in life that are deeply unsatisfying.

Nowadays, most people are like small cogs in the great machine of society, living lives not of their own choosing. The enormous machine of society keeps turning, and people turn along with it along fixed, unchanging tracks, with pitifully little freedom. That is why so many people are mentally exhausted.

At the same time, they tirelessly raise their children to become yet another batch of cogs in that same great machine, repeating their own lives.

Nothing is more tragic for human beings than this. It sounds ridiculous, but the root of it all is simply that modern people's minds have been kidnapped by all kinds of absurd social currents. Amid the roar of the crowd, they live in anxiety, drifting with the tide.

Reading is one of the few paths that can rescue a person's spirit. Unfortunately, today this most enjoyable activity has also been utilitarianized to an appalling degree.

From childhood we demand that our children read all the books we expect them to read. Many parents grow frantic with worry when they see their children reading miscellaneous books unrelated to future schooling and employment.

The result is predictable: most children are forced by their parents to abandon the reading they love and take up "useful" material they do not like at all.

"Useful" is a typically utilitarian idea, but among all kinds of absurd currents of thought, this idea has been trumpeted as the magic key to victory. People believe that if they do not embrace it early, they will suffer a crushing defeat in life's competition.

We are so afraid of failure, so afraid of being ordinary, so afraid of being useless. Because of this fear, we torment ourselves and our children like ants on a hot pan.

In his later years, Mr. Ji Xianlin wrote an essay recalling the "utterly nutritionless" reading he had done in primary school. He said that had it not been for those books that adults considered useless for keeping him company, he would never have developed any interest in reading at all. And throughout his life, whether in cultivating his mind or in scholarship, he relied on nothing but that small spark of reading interest that had not been snuffed out.

How many of us had our reading interest killed in childhood by teachers and parents overly driven by utilitarianism? And how many people today are doing the incredibly foolish thing of killing their own children's reading interest?

Reading really should have no purpose. From my own life experience, once reading has a purpose, it becomes a burden, and in the end one easily grows tired of reading. And once a person grows tired of reading, he is doomed to gradually become a spiritually barren person.

Few people realize how dreadful spiritual barrenness is. They are troubled, stubborn, restless, suspicious; they fly into rages in daily life, are easily provoked, and all sorts of unexpected vexations come crowding in. Year after year, day after day, they end up exhausted themselves while making everyone around them miserable too.

Tracing it to the root, it all has to do with their spirit being too barren. It is exactly as Ms. Yang Jiang said: too little reading, too much thinking. There is an unspoken subtext in Ms. Yang Jiang's words: too little reading means a dull mind, a small heart, and stubborn arrogance.

Under our current popular model of reading, the next generation educated by the vast majority of us will inevitably become spiritually barren dead souls.

Books are like food. We know that a picky diet causes physical malnutrition, but most of us do not realize that too narrow a reading range causes spiritual malnutrition.

Mr. Wang Xiaobo wrote a short essay about a neighbor of his, a simple-minded woman who was a bit slow-witted. This woman could only sew clothes, so every time she met someone she would say, "I can sew clothes."

People with a narrow reading range are not much different from this simple-minded woman. Some people read only a tiny bit in their whole lives, or even just a few shallow articles, and yet they fancy that they have grasped the supreme truth. When they go out to debate with others, they act as though they themselves are the very incarnation of truth. It is truly heartbreaking and ridiculous at the same time.

Very often, shallow people will read one book or one person's articles and then go around proclaiming that what they have learned is enough to solve all kinds of complex problems.

I have met many people who have picked up a smattering of medicine and arrogantly believe that, according to their ideas, they can easily solve complex medical problems—and they speak with such bravado that it seems they can solve every disease under the sun.

I cannot be bothered to debate with them. Usually I politely encourage them to put their ideas into practice. As long as they do not remain on paper alone, most will discover for themselves how ridiculously foolish they are.

As for myself, I take a respectful-but-distant attitude toward die-hard fans of any religion or academic school. I believe that time will make them more mature. If only they could spend a few years in a library, read a few more books, and broaden their horizons in other areas, how wonderful that would be!

Books cannot solve every problem, but they can solve almost the great majority of them.

The problems of human society are actually not that complex. For thousands of years, countless sages have repeatedly thought through the various problems of human society and have already given answers.

As long as one is willing to read widely for a few years without partisan bias or regard for disciplinary boundaries, most people will take a big step forward in their thinking. It is just a pity that so few people can actually do this.