I did read a lot of books. This is one of the influences I said before: Living alone like a mouse, "I have a profound influence on me". But I know better than anyone else: that way of reading is neither for academic performance, nor for the pursuit of knowledge and the exploration of truth, but just an extension of the kind of escape consciousness I mentioned. Looking back now, there really was no other motive or purpose; it was just escape. Holding a pile of food every day, I sneaked into the dormitory quietly, uncovered the black paper on the inside of the push window on the tennis court, and let the daylight in (because the Burmese overseas Chinese cut off the power after 7 o’clock in the morning), and then I He got back into the bed and picked up a book scattered on the bed to read. I don’t have to get up when I’m hungry, because the food and a large pot of water boiled with electricity at night are on the table that I can reach with my backhand. Except for brushing my teeth and going to the toilet, I hardly leave the bed, and I can even not take a bath for a whole month. One late night, when I was squatting on the toilet in a toilet, I heard the Burmese overseas Chinese and his fellow countryman urinating and saying: "That Zhang Dachun must have been here just now." "How did you know?" "Summer vacation He squeezed with us, he smelled strange." "Really?" "Really. So I know where he goes." So they laughed together. After that, I hid in the bedroom and sniffed the clothes in the cabinet, the pillows on the bed, and the quilts that were high and stiff and remained hollow, except for the bad smell of the socks. There is nothing special. This made me quite frustrated, as if an antique treasure that I cared for was shattered in an instant. Imagine: I have tried so hard to keep a distance from the world and live a life that is not as good as a mouse. I actually left the Burmese overseas Chinese with a clue of smell, a trace of life, and a proof that I cannot escape completely. After that, I had to pick up the books again and escape into another world. The world in those books is the only salvation and redemption for this depression that has nowhere to escape between heaven and earth.
What I want to say next has a lot to do with my reading habit. To this day, I can’t be sure whether this happened during a vacation when I was a mouse in school, or some afternoon when I was visiting the bookstore on weekends; to be more honest, I don’t even remember whether it was my university. An experience of the times. For the convenience of narrative, I think it's better to start with the way I read when I was a mouse.
Simply put: I'm the kind of person who doesn't recognize me after reading a book. Reading from opening a book to closing a pair of eyes. Between sleep and sleep, my only real existence is in the book. Why is it called "the only real existence"? That's because when I was in the book, even the person "I" had obviously forgotten; forgetting oneself—that is, letting oneself escape completely and not being recognized by any perception (including oneself). This is really A perfect state. And this state will not differ depending on the type of book. To give an example: I once read a book called "Smoking Is Not Harmful to the Body" by William T. White, a retired Australian physician. He firmly believes that "smoking is harmful to health" is "one of the greatest scams in human history." In this book, he wrote: “Injecting a very small amount of plutonium into a dog almost without exception can cause lung cancer. Basset, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Leeds, used mice for five years in a row. Divide the mice into two groups-one group smokes and the other group does not smoke. The results show that none of the rats in the smoking group developed lung cancer. "This is a passage that I have read so many times that I can still recite it today. It is not a situation of a novel or a story. However, like the fragments in hundreds of thousands and millions of books, it has brought me into a world, a world I have never experienced or imagined before—there may be a In the laboratory, many scientists in silver-gray uniforms are busy. One of them is carrying a translucent plastic bag. Inside is a mixed-breed shepherd dog that was just diagnosed with lung cancer and died of cyanide. Behind the person carrying the bag, there are several guys spraying cigarettes at a group of mice locked in a glass box through a few blowpipes. The glass box is affixed with a label in English: "Smoking Group". Next to it is of course the "non-smoking group". The mice in the latter group were much whiter than the former group, but none of them had lung cancer. Has this scene ever appeared in any corner of the earth? I don't know. But it does stay in my mind forever. Besides—and more importantly—I know for sure that there is such a corner, and "I" is not in that corner. When that corner disappeared, I had fallen asleep and escaped into a dream.