You still love literature, and you still love humanity, just as you did at 17.
You still love reading books on paper and copying out sentences by hand. Your fingers turn the page, your pen pauses. The rhythm of a sentence and the force of feeling that went into it find their way into your breathing, then slowly begin to wash through you. It is as though you could live through what the writer felt in the act of writing, sharing for a moment their sense of beauty, the workings of their mind, the energy of their spirit. A moment of communion, silent and utterly absorbed.
After years of making your way through books, after encountering countless minds of astonishing greatness, you grow almost fastidious about what you let into your own. You grow more deliberate about what you give your attention to and what you might want to keep close for years. You seek out whatever makes you clearer, more sincere, freer in spirit, more at peace. You seek what is lasting and lovely, with the grace of a clear breeze and a moon washed clean by rain. And so, however far you wander, you always find yourself back in the arms of literature, ready to love again.
There is something wonderful about this. In life you see so much ugliness, servility, and darkness in the human heart, the wellspring of every tragedy in the world. Literature is where the human heart puts itself on display. It rolls and turns, flips itself inside out, lets light become shadow. It lays bare every plot within a plot, every interlocking trap in the most hidden recesses of the mind. And still it lets us glimpse the quiet reserve of goodness, which may surface at any moment and in a measure no one can predict. That is what sets human beings apart from all other beings.
Someone who seems base can rise to nobility. Someone who seems to be fooling themselves may see more clearly than anyone. A person who treats a lover as a means to an end may stumble into love and find themselves unable to climb out. Any shiver of feeling, any moment when two minds meet, any time beauty or love moves us, any insight a thought arrives at by a winding route, might redeem a person and rewrite the whole of who they are. Literature holds out the possibility that there is something divine in human beings. And how badly we need that hope.
Across the long literary landscape of the twentieth century, there were writers like García Márquez, Kafka, Borges, Eileen Chang, and Yasunari Kawabata, telling stories as though they could go on forever. Come closer to home and to the present, and there are Yan Lianke, Han Kang, and Chen Chuncheng. They let us live through moments of miracle, moments of being human, so dazzling and so beautiful that your mind spins and dances in their universe, and the little room you live in fills with light. There are hardly words for the delight of it.
Where people rush on in a daze, rain streams down across the vast, untamed fields. Between the black earth and the black sky, the light of literature still flickers within reach. The spirit might yet rise beyond all this. The possibility is there, faint as a dream.
