The Importance of Books

I’m one of those die-hard crazy fans of American TV show since I was an English major. Its visual and auditory allure and fascination as strong as a magnet plunge me into deep addiction to it. So if I get to choose between literature and TV show to improve my English, that’s not a difficult decision to make. The most convincing example is , a couple of weeks ago I went down to the copy room and had ten seasons’ scripts of my favorite sitcom Friends printed out.

Now I’ll maintain, and I think I can defend what may seem like a surprising statement. I think books  are more important than any other sources of knowledge. To show you what I mean, I’ll give you an example, but before I do, I want to state for the record that I am a wonderful person with many friends. To prove my point, I’ll pick two of them to make a comparison. My friend, let’s call him A, falls under the same category of television fans like myself, only crazier, to the degree that he has watched almost every episode updated, in the expense of a terrible dietary habit and very irregular life. Books, however, is not a word collected in his dictionary. Another thing you need to know about my friend A is that he is a big  fat grumbler. Every moment of the day he complains about everything from the terrible food in the cafeteria, the super changeable weather, to people around him that he thinks unbelievable as a human being. I daresay there is no such thing that exists in this world that would be able to escape his whiny “bitching” mouth.

Now, another friend of mine, let’s call her B, is a girl who derives enormous delight from reading world classics and all the works of Jin Yong, a modern Chinese-language novelist of martial arts and chivalry. She is the most confident and optimistic person I have ever known----always looks things on the bright side and thinks, hopes, dreams for the better in adversity. When she lost her ID card, which would pose huge problems, yet she told me that she finally can have a new one with a new picture of her on it. When flunked at linguistics, she told me she could convince her classmates, who always accept her as a straight A student all around, that she is just a normal person, not a god in study, not as predictable as you thought she were. Anyway her cup is always half full. You see, every now and then I wondered, how and when could I turn out to be a life-affirming person as she is. So what I intend to suggest is that my friend B, one with a tremendous craving for literature, is endowed with a precious inner serenity that strips away all the negative and the inessential off her.

If this is not convincing enough, the other day when I asked my friend B to do me a favor on the phone, out of nowhere she told me it must be a wonderful sunny day where I was. although I know she seems the one that is able to predict, I was like, “what are you talking about? how do you know that? ” She replied as this, “it’s the bird’s chirping all around you, silly. It’s so very beautiful, it’s like the mornings depicted in Pride and Prejudice. You gotta take pictures of the birds and send them to me”. Now you have to know, I was there the whole morning and I barely heard the sound of nature which she did through the phone, the sound that is so very typically recorded in the literature. Then I came to realize that for quite a long time I had lost a state of mind that she always has to sit down and really appreciate the beauty of nature in this buzzed world today; and that is exactly where the difference between her inner serenity and my mental chaos lies in.

According to a piece of news I read on April 23^rd the World Book Day, the average number of books that Chinese read every year is, you guess it, a mere four, nine times less than that of Japanese. Alarming, isn’t it? I myself had so much fun with TV show and knowledge, but my near-sightedness got more and more serious by the day, and my eyes got strained and watery when I wrote and revised this speech on my PC, then I started to have second thoughts about my method of studying. And even the British philosopher Francis Bacon put it in his famed prose, (now I’ll toss it out again), “Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.”  Then I told myself, why not go back to the books?