Why Do We Read At All?

We are easily impressed by the well-read. No one is turned off by a pair of sparkling eyes that tell you they know things, things clear of our small corner. Reading fires up such eyes and puts stars in them.

Yet on the other hand we, at least some of us sometimes don’t see much use in it. We even look down upon those taken by “too much” reading and call them nerds and bookworms.

Reading can be regarded as one option of life among many other things-not a necessity, just something to be picked up or put aside at heart’s will. Yet one thing remains a secret to those without books: the human heart needs light before it has sight to choose. We have no option but read for enlightenment before we exercise our will.

First things first, why do I keep exhorting my energineering students to read? So they have the eyes of Plato to see through ages and vicissitudes of life? This question is too deep to not wind us back at the “what universities are for” thesis that reeled among our educational philosophers for thousands of years.

The first priority of life for my polytechnic students is to acquire adequate skills and problem-solving abilities to survive and thrive in an industrial company . But where do skills come from? A lot of hand-holding from teachers, mentors and craft-masters for apprentices will help but nothing explains things so thoroughly as theories, mechanisms and operational steps in written words.

Add all that clarity from reading to practical hands-on training, you have tools under your belt now and a mind to grasp more to come. In books the right ways of doing things are printed in black-and-white intelligent articulation, which learners can consult time and again without any fear that soon the memory will fade or the spoken words will dissipate.

Reading informs you on what you need to know to get things done, especially when learned people are not around or willing to spoon-feed you answers to your questions. And half the time, we don’t even know what to ask of the masters given a tuition-free oportunity to do so.

Intelligence is called for to come up with questions to the point.

Intelligence needs to be in place first for the learners to discern the suitable solution, especially in real-life scenarios as opposed to school simulations.

Intelligence gets built the best by reading written words and that hasn’t changed since the invention of scrolls, no matter what other dazzling media came after, be it picutres, I-MAX or powerpoints. The reason lies in written words’ inherent utility to abstract and condense information and arguments, which will take videos and pictures to unzip and aural repetitions to knock into consciousness.

Even without the pragmatic functions in terms of handing you tools and letting you in on craft techniques, books pose as a magnetic realm where each plug you in a different world.

I particularly love those that can make me understand, appreciate, and love beyond what I see and feel currently.

_Anne of Green Gables kindled a flame of admiration in me for nature, for idyllic country life and for what education is. The little orphan girl Anne’s high spirit, pure enjoyment of everything beautiful around her and refreshing unselfconsciousness rubbed off on me.

She was more of a heroine than Jane Eyre if I have to choose: one is sunlight trickling through apple-tree leaves, the other is river-water flowing and bumping under ice near the end of winter.

_Educated: A Memoir _sets me before the critical question: to judge or not to judge? For the first time in life, it dawned on me I don’t have to morally rate people around me or even myself over every single matter of controversy in order to move forward.

The purpose of life is not to be in the right all the time, especially not toward made-up dilemmas, others’ ethical predicaments or rationalization over one’s own past actions.

What is more important shines at the horizon a bit further: to change, to grow, to advance. Understand what is going on and hit the road, leaving behind what you have no duty or desire for and leaving with what you believe needs to be fulfilled.

Books, fiction or non-fiction alike, untangles, enrich and uplift our heart and mind.

The only thing they might not be able to do for you is living your life with its daily niddy griddies. That, you gotta tread out yourself, with tear, sweat and sometimes blood. But the inspiration, the enlightenment, the guidance lights a lamp for you to find the way.

Even whatever landscape awaits at the end of the road or whatever beautiful scenaries along the way organically grow through your reading, as a tree to a forest.

Reading, literally, makes our life better as it runs a snow-melt creek through your originally-foggy mind and allows jasmine, plantain and cedar blossom into an expansive, structured and charming garden in there.

Reading is not just making the world bigger for us - it makes our own heart a better, bigger and breezier world itself to enrich, encourage and expand others.