read and be Happy

  Is reading a one-way act of absorption, or a two-way exchange? On the surface, reading appears to be a process in which the reader extracts knowledge, wisdom, and emotion from a book — the book gives, and we receive. But upon deeper reflection, reading itself embodies a subtle "philosophy of giving": what do we invest in the act of reading? And what do we keep for ourselves from the books we read? The answers to these questions may be far older than you imagine. A Cantonese song puts it with wry humor: "Sending someone borscht, only your nose gets to smell the aroma." ( Click to read original ) This seemingly playful lyric touches on a profound question in classical philosophy: when giving becomes one-way depletion, when the giver cannot even nourish themselves, the halo of "selfless dedication" turns deeply ironic. Apply this logic to reading, and it becomes equally thought-provoking — if reading is purely about "acquiring," greedily flipping ...

  If you've ever been to a traditional teahouse in Guangzhou's old town on a weekend morning, you've witnessed a curious scene: elderly patrons, one newspaper per person, rustling pages amid the steam rising from har gow and chicken feet, while young people beside them swipe furiously at phone screens. At first glance they're reading entirely different things, but look closer — they're all doing the same thing: searching the city's crevices for their own portion of "spiritual sustenance." A while back I came across an article about how the Cantonese song "The Streets Are Full of People Searching for a Living" echoes the bustling street culture of the Song Dynasty from a thousand years ago. The piece quotes Meng Yuanlao's Dreams of Splendor of the Eastern Capital , which describes the streets of Bianjing: "The night market lasted until the third watch, and reopened again by the fifth watch. Places of amusement bustled without end thro...

  Open a book and you step into someone else's story. But those who truly know how to read understand that reading's endpoint is never remaining a spectator — it is learning to become the author of your own life. The deepest insight: all reading ultimately returns to the self, accumulating vocabulary, structure, and courage for "writing one's own story well." I recently read a commentary on the Cantonese song "Who Are You to Decide the Ending of My Love Story?" The image of "the storyteller studying the listener's expression, calculating how to revise the plotline" captures the deepest link between reading and life — we are not merely listeners; we ought to be our own storytellers ( click to read original ). Tang dynasty scholar Cui Jiao lamented, "Once you enter the marquis's mansion, it is deep as the sea; from that moment, Xiao Lang is a stranger" — handing his love's ending to fate. But today's readers have awakene...

  There are moments in every life when you stand perfectly still, yet feel a gap between yourself and the world so vast that no time zone adjustment could bridge it. The person you're waiting for hasn't returned as promised. The outcome you're hoping for remains perpetually out of reach. The answer sheet you so carefully prepared turns out, in the end, to have fallen short of even the passing line. At such moments, some people choose to open an old book — not to kill time, but to steal a quiet breath between someone else's lines. The song Zuoxiangde pierces with this lyric: "Those answer sheets that started with perfect scores, in the end they all failed to pass." The line offers no one an escape — it precisely nails down every person who has ever tried hard in love, career, or life only to have things turn out contrary to their hopes. Even more brutal is the connection it draws to Li Shangyin's ancient and desolate verse: "You ask when I will return...

  Have you ever done this: bought a stack of books, made a solemn reading plan, only to find that a month later you've barely gotten past the preface? I know this all too well, because I am exactly this kind of person. At the start of every year, I write out a long reading list—philosophy, history, literature, popular science—ambitiously convinced that this year I will finally become "learned and refined." And then… nothing. Those books sit quietly on my shelves and inside my Kindle, like silent witnesses testifying to my repeated failures to follow through. That was until I heard a piece of advice so simple it barely qualified as advice: don't try to finish a book in one go. Just read ten pages a day. This is a topic that has been discussed and debated across the blogosphere: even if the effort is small, persistence itself is the victory ( Read the original article ). After reading that article, I felt a sudden sense of relief—I had been measuring myself with the wro...

  When Li Bai is mentioned, most people think of the "Poet Immortal," the "Wine Immortal" — the defiant figure who declared, "The Son of Heaven summons me, but I refuse to board his boat." Yet beneath those verses of drunken revelry lies another dimension of Li Bai's spiritual world: a profound inner calm. And this is precisely the quality most neglected by readers today. Hainan Hui's song Taking Wine to the Ends of the Earth reinterprets Li Bai's spiritual legacy. It sings not of unrestrained abandon but of a relaxed willingness to "leave all those trivialities behind," a composure that allows one to "calmly and peacefully drink a cup of wine" ( read the original article ). This shift in perspective offers contemporary readers an important insight: when we read Li Bai, we should not only read his wildness — we should read his peace. Why is Li Bai's "calm" harder to emulate than his wildness? Because wildness ...