Yet what she did that evening may probably be what I might not forget in a long while.
All I knew of her: she is Korean. She reads and writes fluently in Korean, Japanese, Mandarin and English. She now lives in Singapore with her family. Her spoken English was not as fluent as her written. She was very fair, with a deep set of eyes that flowed with years of experiences. I caught myself, for brief moments, swimming in the nostalgic green of her eyes. She is over 50 years of wisdom.
We have had brief conversations at the workplace as colleagues in the last month. She learnt I studied abit of philosophy; I regretted even mentioning it because it came with it an expectation I couldn't fulfil. She was a voracious reader, and she expected the same of a philosophy, somewhat embarrassed, student. She started rattling of continental philosophers I barely knew. Gulp. I just smiled and nodded.
I looked up all the literature and philosophy books so recommended, and realised they were all classics, and I never heard of them. So I am no student of philosophy; I merely have a piece of thicker-than- usual paper which said I studied philosophy. Gulp.
Then that evening she pulled out a book from her bag and handed it to me. It was a thin book. It had a cover illustration which would not make me buy a book off a shelf if I judged a book by its cover, which I admittedly do far too often. She said I could have it. It was a Korean-published English copy of Khalil Gibran's 'The Prophet'. I was stumped, but before I could process what just happened, she went on sheepish about the fact it was a cheap copy, it had Korean annotations, it was not new...
The gesture was overwhelming, and I was sincerely touched. I realised as I grow older the bar to being 'touched' has been raised, possibly bumped up by cynicism.
When I composed myself, I asked her to write something on the inside of the book. She apologises for not writing in English and writes in Korean. She translated what she wrote: keep reading and through reading lead a better life and be a better person.
That really hit me again.
When was the last time I thought about reading as a nurturing process? When was the last time I heard of reading as romantic as this? I subscribe to over 30 RSS feeds on Google Reader; each day I have an excess 1000 online news articles to read. In the Google age of information-overload, reading has becoming more of an efficiency-quantitative excercise. I really cannot remember when I last heard of reading being alluded to being an experience as opposed to routine exercise.
I admittedly browse when I read; too little time with too much information to devour. It is snippets of information I pick up as I sieve through writings. I often curse at writers in my head when they do not write economically. And here is this Korean lady who gives me a literature book, asks me to ponder upon every sentence, re-read books and says all this will make me a better person. She then explains why she needs no religion in her life to act as cosmic-guide; all her reading has provided all that she might need from religion.
Wow. And all this said over a few pieces of paper stuck together into what is a modern joke called a paperback; at least the Googles and Amazons of our world today have made it so with e-books.
Despite all the words here to describe, this was really a brief encounter of book-presentation. But it really made me think, got my brains firing. It reawakened a sedated linguistic conscious that decidedly went to sleep and turned reading into a efficacy-deal. I miss literature, and all the nuances and textures that comes with the craft.
But I'm not about to overly-romanticise this. Yet, I'm being conscious about a discerning reader; knowing to exercise the right balance between being effective and appreciative in reading. After all, there is no point reading too much between the lines in modern writing when there is not much being put in there.
