Chapter 19 Study Book Disaster

Birds of a feather flock together, and most of my friends are also nerds.Very few friends ask me to go outdoors and fall in love in spring.Most of the time, I am always with books.Most of the time, I always shut myself on the six stacks, among the four walls, making nitrogen and daydreaming.My study is neither as luxurious as a medieval Gothic castle in Horace Walpole nor as shabby as a loft in Grub Street.I don't have many books, and I don't have any statistics. It's about 2,000 volumes. "Books are hated when they are used." After spending so much money on books, it is still not enough to check what to do.When it is useful, it is often found that a certain book has been borrowed from a friend and has not been returned.When they are useless, they are full of pits and valleys; besides neatly arranged on the bookshelves, they are everywhere on the desk, on the chair, on the record player, on the window sill, on the bed, under the bed.Because I have written articles for magazines and edited publications, in addition to residents, there are many floating accounts in my book city, such as "Literary Magazine", "Modern Literature", "Chinese and Foreign", "Works" ", "Literary World", "Free Youth" and so on, naturally, there are hundreds of "Literary Stars".

"Abdominal poetry and gas from China".However, most of those poems and books are not in the stomach, but on the shelf, under the shelf, in the corner of the wall, or even at the foot of the desk.My study is often plagued by book disasters, to the desperation of my wife, mother-in-law, and floor-cleaning daughter-in-law.Whenever the servant girl wipes the floor, she always piles the books behind the shelf or under the bed on my bed.My mother-in-law even suggested several times to use Qin Shihuang's method to solve it.Once, during a typhoon, there was a flood in Zhonghe Township. Thousands of copies of Xia Jing's family drifted with the tide. When the wind died down and the water receded, they found them on the floor, in the kitchen, in the toilet, on the roof of the dog, and even on the trees in the yard, or Positive or negative, everywhere.If there was such a flood in Xiamen Street, there must be a more serious book disaster in my house after the flood.

You would say, since you are afraid of prints as a disaster, why don't you tidy them up so that they are in their place and come as soon as they are taken?Impossible, impossible!My answer is impossible.Anyone who has a few books will probably understand how troublesome and time-consuming it is to sort out books.For a nerd, Lishu is sad with a little memory.Well, the title page of this book reads: "Purchased in Taipei in April 1952" (you hadn't graduated from university at that time).On the inside back cover of that book, there is a lovely mailing address of a girlfriend (I don’t need to remember it now, her address is mine. Sigh, sigh! Is this happiness or confusion).There is a book that reads: "To Yu Guangzhong, in Iowa City in 1959" (the author is dead, and his majestic background has entered the history of literature. In the future, my daughters will read in the history of literature How did he feel).Another book reminded me of a good friend who was living poorly in a small town on the other side of the Pacific Ocean and hadn't written poetry for a long time.Opening this red-faced and gilded antique collection of poems, unexpectedly an oak leaf with brittle veins falling to the ground lightly.What autumn ghost is this?So many books, so many bundles of letters, so many stacks of manuscripts!I have come, I have loved, I have lost—that should be the epitaph on every gravestone.And this is also the feeling that every writer must have when sorting out old books.Who can sort out his own memories?

What's more, while arranging books, one also needs to read books.There are endless books, especially my own collection.Anyone who can read his own collection of books must become a great scholar.Some people always borrow books to read, but they never return them.Some people buy books after reading them, and never read them after they are bought.I belong to the latter.Many of my friends belong to the former.This taxonomy is of course purely subjective.Once, I found that some of my good books, even out-of-print books, were borrowed by friends for a long time, and even ignored for a long time. I angrily considered writing an article to denounce these elegant thieves, no, " Ya Pirates" because their crimes are public.I soon dismissed this idea, because I found that I was not free from the style of "elegant robber".On the shelf, there are several books that have been borrowed from friends for a long time. There is a big book on poetry that I borrowed from a colleague in Tamkang. It has not been returned for more than half a year, and he has not come to remind me.Of course, such a short period of "overseas residence" is not at the level of "naturalization".There is the second volume of "The Tradition of American Literature", which was originally borrowed by Mr. Zhu Limin. Later, he thought that I would not pay back, and in despair, he simply declared that he gave it to me, and included the first volume as a gift.Most of the more than a dozen books that have been "naturalized" due to long-term borrowing are the property of the Department of Foreign Languages ​​and Literature of National Taiwan University.Their "overseas Chinese age" has exceeded eleven years.It is said that the administrator of the department library is still the same lady, and I was so scared that I dared not step into her jurisdiction for ten years.Borrowing money and not paying it back is immoral.Books are also bought with money, but under the mentality of "literature knows no borders", it seems that borrowing books is still a worthless thing.

In addition to the long-loaned books, there are quite a few books—thirty or forty volumes—that were bought in debt.They were all "bought" from a certain bookstore, and the "buy" was bought, but the bill has not been paid for several years.Of course, I also have collateral - the bookstore sold more than a hundred copies of "Halloween" and "Stalactite" for me, and it has never been settled.But I must state right away that, so far, that bookstore owes me far less than I owe the bookstore.I don't think I remembered wrongly, or it can be said that I didn't miscalculate, otherwise I wouldn't have kept silent as it developed.Probably the owner of the bookstore also thought he owed me a lot, and tolerated it for so long.

In addition to the above two books with less honorable origins, some of the books in the collection are gifts from writers and friends.The vast majority of them are new collections of poetry in Chinese, followed by novels, essays, criticism and translation, and naturally there are also a few works in English, and even French, Korean and Turkish.Of course, these donated books have a bright origin, because the title pages have the inscriptions written by the original authors or translators, which is even more valuable.But, frankly speaking, I seldom read all of this kind of books in detail.I dare say that no writer will list all the donated books of other writers.British writer Belloc (Hilaire Belloc) has two lines of harmonic poetry:

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: “His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.” Barely translated into Chinese, it becomes: When I die, I hope people will say: "His sins are crimson, but his books are read." The read here is a pun. It is not only the past participle of "read", but also has the same pronunciation as "red", so it is impossible to translate it vividly.What Belloc means is that no matter how sinful a person is, as long as he has read all the books in his collection carefully, it is considered valuable.It is conceivable that a person, especially a writer, cannot read all the books donated by others.On average, I receive thirty or forty books (including publications) as gifts every month. I must confess that I have neither the time nor the desire to read them all.In fact, there are so many great books that one glance at the author's name on the cover, or a title so vulgar, you don't have the appetite to read it.There are only two kinds of writers in the world—good and bad.With some miraculous exceptions, bad writers never become good writers.When I write the above paragraph, I may unnecessarily offend many writer friends who donated books.But I can immediately ask them: "Don't get angry. You can reflect on yourself, have you read all of my gift books, or even partially read them?" I think most of them dare not answer in the affirmative.Those "difficult" modern poems, those translated poems "chewing food and feeding people", who can force people to read them?In the 19th century, Oxford University professor CL Dodgson (pen name Lewis Carroll) presented a volume of his fairy tale novel (Alice in Wonderland) to Queen Victoria.The queen liked the book very much and asked Professor Da Jusheng to present his future works as gifts.Soon she really received his second big book - a thick mathematics paper.I don't think the Queen will finish reading the first page.

The third category of books should be their own works.They include four volumes of poetry, three volumes of translated poetry, one translated novel, and one translated biography.Some of these books still have three or four hundred copies, some have only a dozen or so, and some are even out of print.Up to now, I still clearly remember the feeling of worrying about gains and losses when printing the first book.On the night of publication, I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep all night, imagining how that little book would shock the entire literary world the next day, how it would be reprinted in three editions, and become legendary like Byron.Mr. Liang Shiqiu, who wrote a review for that book, was not so optimistic.He expects to "sell three hundred copies at most. You can print five hundred copies."As a result, I printed a thousand copies and sold more than 340 copies within half a year.Soon after I participated in the pre-official training for the first college graduates, I stopped entrusting bookstores to sell them.It has already been sold out to Mr. Zhou Mengdie.At present, there are five collections of poems that I have published but have not yet been published into collections, one is "Selected Translations of Modern Poems", one is "Letters from Chase Deffer's Family", one is a critical biography of painter Paul Klee and two collections of prose.If I don’t die young—of course, the time of buying half-ticket and acting as a “child prodigy” is long gone—by the time I’m fifty, I hope I’m already a writer with fifty works (including translations), of which there should be at least twenty. collection of poems.This wish made to Nine Muses is probably a little too big.However, judging from the current "output" of writing, it is absolutely not a problem to get 30 books with a discount of 40%.

The last category of collections far exceeds the sum of the above three categories.They are books in Chinese and English that I bought with cash.Ashamed, the ratio of Chinese books to English books has become more and more disparity over the past ten years.It's about three to seven at the moment.Most nerds both read and play with books.Reading is the content of reading, playing with books is the appearance of playing with books.Books can indeed be "played".A beautifully printed book with a gorgeous cover, its material itself is a kind of beauty.The reason why I bought so many English books, especially the colorful pocket editions, is that I fell in love with those colorful and stylishly designed covers at first sight, which is often a major reason. The elegance of "Penguin Books", the dignifiedness of "Modern Books", the liveliness of "Pocket Books", the simplicity of "Everyone Books", the luxury of "Garden City Books", the grandeur of "Skira Art Books" in Switzerland, are perfect. ... These are the joys that make silverfish wander in their studies.Senior nerds usually have an incurable problem: they like to sit at the desk, they don’t necessarily have to read any book or study any problem, they just like to touch this book, flip through that book, and compare the cover , look at the illustrations and table of contents, and smell (especially new books) the nice smell of paper and ink.Just like that, an expensive afternoon was over.

Dr. Johnson once said, since we can't read all the books we should read, why don't we read them willfully?That's how I read.When I was in college, I used to follow the guidance of literary history and read "Tom Jones" with more than 800 pages and "City of Vanity" with about 700 pages. , even gritted his teeth, and swallowed "The Egoist" while reading and cursing.Since graduating, this kind of gnawing has become worse and worse.Up to now, I have been busy writing, translating, compiling, teaching, and discussing poems. Apart from being divided into pieces, I have almost no time to read poems, or even have time to read.There are always more books on the shelf than in the belly; I am afraid that less than three-tenths of the books have been read.Nevertheless, the problem of "playing" books has not been cured.Because I often "play", I am quite familiar with many unfinished books. If I want to refer to a certain opinion or quote a certain text, I can easily turn to that page.In fact, some books cannot be appreciated without playing with them for a period of time.For example, Van Gogh's painting collection and Cummings' poetry collection need to be played for a long time to become familiar with.

However, after ten years of playing, I am still not satisfied with my study.Because it is too small, there has been a lot of book disasters in the study.Those western-style books that are everywhere, full of pits and valleys, sweaty but not full of buildings, are like batches of hooligans that can never be banned, and they cannot be placed.Because it is a Japanese style, it is too short, and like a "sunflower", it always faces north and never gets the sun.If there is one more gloomy writer in China, this north-facing study should be responsible.Sitting in the shadow of this north-facing window, I'm like a fruit full of southern fruit refrigerated in the refrigerator.During the day, I seem to be immersed in the bottom of the sea, and the silent darkness plays gray music.At night, I seem to hear the sound of the Eskimos sledding, and the long beard of the North Star hangs down, clanging, and ringing a series of white stalactites. However, in this cold palace of art, many memories are still hot.When friends come to visit, I often invite them to sit and talk here instead of the living room. It seems that this is my "cultural background". If I don't come here, the weight of friendship will not fall into my heart.Frost's gaze hangs on the wall, my muse is male.Here, I once heard Wu Wangyao, a lost prince in modern poetry, tell me some ghost stories about scarlet fever and emerald cold.Here, Huang Yong showed me almost all of his works, and sharpened his cold criticism.Here, Wang Jingxi encountered Huang Yong for the first time, but, to our great disappointment, there was no quarrel.Here, Chen Lifeng, a dignified editor, also left behind a black memory...Compared with these memories, the messy books look much more orderly.