Recently, I am reading the Meditations, written by Marcus Aurelius, one emperor of the old Roman. I notice that it is composed of small items, honest but artificial, which release his genuine feelings producing in his heart and maturing in his brains. I love the style of it much, and write something, following the pattern. Of course, what I write is just some superficial, not as thoughtful as his, but I just post them and share my true ideas with you without any other purpose. That’s all I want to speak ahead of “My Meditations”.
On Reading
There is such a large amount of knowledge and your ability is finite, so do not be greedy for it and do not try to achieve the pursuit of perfection and comprehensiveness, both of which is impossible from my perspective. What you should do and what you can do are, identically, to focus on some particular problem in some particular field, and investigate it. You go to learn what is necessary when you find it so. If you learn what you need from your seniors, it is not bad that you acquire it ahead, time permitting.
The purpose of reading is only to enrich your knowledge and to broaden your horizon but to control your mind. Books, newspapers, magazines, and any other material you read merely provide you with the aspects of your thinking, the angles of your thinking, the patterns of your thinking and others, overall, or rather the reference of your thinking. And they cannot give you directions, or you cannot only follow what is presented in them; it is not wise if you just do as they say, I think. Don’t let them lead you; you should dominate them when you do reading just you eat something,-you should carefully distinguish food ahead of you, and just pick up what is good for your heath; and then cook them, chew them, swallow them, digest them and absorb them; and then they constitute part of your body and coexist with your former body,-for it is you that are reading them, and it is not books or others that are teaching you. Only doing like above, can we be the owners of books rather than the slaves.
Indeed there`s a huge reservoir of knowledege for us to tap. As you rightly said, it`s impossible for any human being to absorb all this knowledge. Like food,we try to digest the good stuff and throw away that which we don`t like. Reading is only an activity and is good habit to adopt. It activates our thinking. stimulates our imagination and as you said, broadens our horizon. However we must also learn to read critically.
ReplyDelete