Thoughts Beyond Pages: A Summer of Reading Exploration
作者： Sophia
See the world with a 1.5x lens, view the human nature with a 0.5x lens. Explore the nature with a microscope, while you stand high when you ever tried to explore humanity.
To Kill a Mockingbird
I can still envision the time that I just started this book, it was quite an awful start, in fact, because this book seems to begin suddenly, you are just stuffed and overwhelmed with a bunch of names and places and information, just as clueless as when I saw the name of this book, To Kill a Mockingbird. No book will thoroughly talk about teaching you how to kill a bird, wouldn’t it? Then what does it really tell us? After I read the back of the book, it seemed hard to understand too, I just seized the words, lawyer, and justice. So maybe this book is about a biography of a lawyer? Talking about how he or she defends a black man in a court. But the story is far more than this, it takes a perspective from a kid, a kid who’s just qualified to go to primary school. It even took me quite a time to figure out whether this kid was a girl or a boy since Scout Finch was really like a tomboy who played wildly with her brother and the boy Dill. But after I understood what this book was mainly talking about—the reminisces of a girl whose father was a lawyer—I immersed myself in the interesting stories of Scout. Reading these kinds of novels, where a person shares his or her experiences with you, makes me feel like I’m experiencing another person’s life that I would never have a chance to come in contact with in reality. And those experiences were so real that you could put yourself in their shoes, laugh in their happy moments, and feel aggrieved when something unfair happened to them. I can learn more about people’s lives as early as the 1930s and explore the gap between different people’s minds in the God’s-eye view.
The story begins with Scout, Jem, and Dill being tentative to the weird man, Arthur Radley, or what they call, Boo Radley. Stories about him are prevalent in Maycomb County, people were all scared of him and suspicious about him, as he never came out from the house and stuck a pair of scissors in his father’s leg and people were told to keep away from his house. But with their instinctive curiosity, the three kids tried many times to get close to Radley’s place and to know more about this mysterious guy, and always ran like a frightened horse after they heard some slight movement in the house. But as time went on, there appeared to be signs from Boo that he would love to make friends with Jem and Scout, as he put little gifts in the tree hole in front of his house. In fact, the dolls that imitated Scout and Jem seem quirky to me, and I thought Boo might do something horrible to them, Jem kept them in his box carefully, however, and he became more respectful to Boo after that. He owns a kid’s pure heart as he will think of the bright side of other people, which is nice, and in fact, correct, because Boo has a clear-cut stand on what to love and what to hate. At the most dangerous moment, also the apex of the entire story, when Jem and Scout are in danger in the dark woods with the threat of the wicked Bob Ewell, Boo stood out and fought with Mr. Ewell and carried poor little Jem to his bed. His moves reminded me of the words Atticus said to the kids, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Yeah, what most people thought about Boo, a figure of danger and terror, is just merely hearsay, since they never really got the chance to get in touch with him. He might be viewed as crazy by a normal eye, and he’s indeed in some way, but these “antagonists” can also be nicer and friendlier and more righteous than most people who thought they were and acted innocent, like Bob Ewell, a total liar and hypocrite.
Jem, Scout’s big brother, and Atticus, Scout’s father, are the main characters in this book disregarding Scout. Maybe it’s because I just finished a journey with Tara Westover about her miserable experience with her brother and father in Educated, and I was constantly worried for Scout. Especially when Jem was getting older and was more irritable, and in that instance when he gave a hard push of the tire with Scout in it then it hit Radley’s door, I was greatly worried for Scout and was even imagining what violence she might experience. But luckily, this is definitely an educated family. And those kinds of violence will never happen. You can clearly see when Scout entered primary school, she already had the ability of literacy and possessed an educational level much higher than any of the other students, that this must be a family that cared much about education and knowledge.
As the story develops, I get to know more about Atticus, a polite, emotionally intelligent, wise, righteous, modest, and liberal gentleman. With his guidance for Scout and Jem, they will, for no doubt, have bright futures and be kind people. Atticus keeps his good deeds a secret. He was a sharpshooter, a man good at many aspects, but he never brags about those talents, because he wanted to teach his children modesty. He had real manners and respected every single person in Maycomb. He was tolerant, suffered a lot of humiliation from other people when news came out about him “defending for a nigger”, and Bob Ewells even spat on him, but he didn’t fight back, he never fought back, because he knew that would be useless when you try to speak to a deaf. He acted as a role model in front of his children, teaching them to do nothing and that would avoid unnecessary troubles, because “One must lie under certain circumstances and at all times when one can’t do anything about them”. He was an enlightened man, a man whose thoughts and beliefs surpassed decades of society because he knew that all men are equal. Not only knew but acted out. Though he understood the truth that in that society, in their court, as long as it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man would always get to win, he still tried his best to persuade the jury, to protect the right for colored people. He respected the Negroes, and even though it seemed to be against the social norm, he still stuck with himself and tried to influence others to be impartial.
The whole book makes you feel very realistic, it doesn’t idealize the context or deify Atticus’s role. Because in that historical background, there’s pervasive racism in the society. Many people were open-minded and tried their best to stop injustice from happening, but their forces were too weak to defend a common conception that colored people, what most people called niggers, are meant to be on the lower level of white man, and no matter what the white man has done to the black man, the white man always got to win. And the ones who respected every human being were insulted as “nigger lovers”. I still remember how cousin Francis insulted Atticus in front of Scout, and was cunny to and pretend it was all Scout who was messing up and being rude. I gnashed my teeth, I thought it was so unfair and I hated Francis. But protagonists are meant to be tolerant, with the reminders from Atticus, Scout was acting more and more mature.
With meticulous observation and analysis from Atticus, people in the court all realized that there were some problems for the Ewells, and Tom Robinson was innocent. But still, the jury was unfair, and with great disappointment to the reader, Tom Robinson lost. But this was actually the answer from that era: blacks were limited to domestic servants, field hands, and garbage collectors. Caprina was respectful, she guided Scout and Jem after their birth and had her feminine influence on them, but with social racism, Aunt Alexandra neglected her impact because she was a black woman. There was one thing that I still remember that Caprina had said, was when she was taking Jem and Scout with her to the black church, she spoke in the black people’s accent. When Scout asked her why, she told her that folks don’t like people knowing more than them. It’s true in reality, that sometimes we just have to fit in a little bit more and do what others do in order to avoid some unnecessary troubles.
Genius on the Left, Lunatic on the Right
I watched two movies, The Imitation Game, and A Beautiful Mind recently. These two movies are both biographies, and they talk about the life of Allen Turing and John Nash respectively. John Nash was known for having schizotypal personality disorder. Without even knowing, multiple characters were emerging in his life, but were all pseudo figures who were all created in his mind. He went crazy, as other people could see, that he was busy doing tasks no one required him to do but from the split characters in his mind. He was scared and threatened till he finally realized that these characters seemed never to grow up or grow old, so with help from his wife and the doctors, he finally came to coexist and ignore those imagined characters. John Nash was for sure suffered from mental illness. On the other hand, Allen Turing didn’t have any apparent diagnosis but also acted strange in his daily life, compared to normal people. He seemed to close himself by rarely communicating with others, had an eccentric trait, and was super arrogant in front of other people. These geniuses, all seemed to be abnormal in some way. So, with an interest in “genius versus lunatic”, I began the journey in the book Genius on the Left, Lunatic on the Right.
This book was quite different than what I expected, it contains mainly conversations between the author and those “psychopaths”, it’s sort of an interview. But how can you actually talk to them if they are already insane? I wondered in the first place before I started to read. But as I got to know more about these patients’ lives and what they are struggling with, I received a brand-new vision for the psychopaths, or, maybe I should call them “people stuck with their beliefs that are strange to the majority”.
There’s never an explicit line between black and white. Likewise, you can never say specifically that a man’s a madman. While reading this book, the author took me to have a close view of the psychopaths. Most of them were extremely smart, or you can say that they have a clear logic in persuasion. In fact, we, as normal people, often question this world or the things that we see. For example, I used to have this idea that maybe the reality that we now assume was the dreams of the world of our dreams. Yeah, this definitely sounds like a tung twister, but, haven’t you suspected the world in front of us or have this sort of strange thoughts? But we usually stop wondering these strange questions because we want to believe in science and common sense. However, the “lunatic”, at this point, delve deeper and deeper into their ideas, and invent their own sort of theory, which are somewhat based on science but also somewhat too extreme that you may question whether they may or may not be brainwashed by some paganism. Well, they have their own logic and are persistent to it, so it’s hardly possible for any other people to criticize them with the common point of view. They stick to what they believe and you will be disrespectful if you try to “rectify” their theories.
This book took me to a brand-new perspective of the lunatics, and through their eyes, I saw a different world. In fact, we never know whether their theories were right or wrong, maybe some of their beliefs that are being viewed ridiculous now will be proved in near future, but, who knows? Since their notions haven’t been justified yet, these people will always be identified as lunatics. The reason why some people are acknowledged as genius, is because their notion are being proved and verified by the public; lunatic, conversely, have ideas that seemed to be incomprehensible for the public for now.
A story about a girl left me with deep impression. The girl acted weird by mimicking many other people’s behaviors in an extremely vivid way. Sometimes she imitates every action of an old man, and another time she copies her boyfriend, in which drove everyone else crazy. I thought it was indefensibly rude at first glance, but when the author got the chance to chat with this girl, I suddenly understood her motivation. The girl was in fact trying to understand people she observed by doing what they’ve done, in this way, she can naturally stood in their perspective and understand them. For example, she first observe what elderly people usually do and how they behave, so she tried to imitate them as real as possible, try to perceive their way of thinking a problem, then she gradually can achieve a very high level of imitation, because she totally grasped the way old people live. Change the perspective you view this world, then, you will have a totally different inspiration. That’s why people always told us that stand in others’ shoes when you try to understand them, it works, really. Even though she acted distinctive to what normal people usually does, she still has her reason and a view for the world, thus I conclude that every lunatic shall be respected.
The difference between genius and lunatic is very subtle, it’s just their ideas and perspectives that varies. Geniuses are on the left, lunatics are on the right, there’s only a step between them, but kept them thousand miles apart. So the world needs to be more tolerant, we shall allow people having different ideas than the general flow, everyone can fly very high and reach the apex.
There were many stories about the so-called lunatics stare at something for hours or be in a daze for days. Maybe because I was too stuffed with things happening recently, I also pursued for this kind of tranquility and thought about this idea: see the world with a 1.5x lens, view the human nature with a 0.5x lens. The mother nature is too much to explore, we shall all live in the moment and enjoy the present; human nature, however, should be blurred up when you view it, it’s too elusive and you will feel those agony when you see through it. So explore the nature with a microscope, while you stand high when you ever tried to explore humanity.
The Imitation Game
Now I would like to get back to The Imitation Game. I learned that Alan Turing had his very talents in marathons and there were scenes of him running crazily by the sunset. That really impressed me a lot, of how important and inevitable living a healthy life is. While those experts dug into their field and made progress, we must have a fit and healthy body. No matter what sport it is, trying to immerse yourself in something other than the task that you’re assigned with can also help you to have a clearer mindset. When you feel like you’ve been stuck into something indescribable and just couldn’t move forward, maybe it’s the good time for you to halt your progress and just have a rest. Usually in the most entangled moments of your brain, it would be better to slow down your pace, then you may have the chance to broaden your horizon.
Another thing that The Imitation Game reminded me is about self and group. I’m quite an introvert, or maybe not a thorough introvert but I really love the moments spending with myself only. I can do anything I like, I’m free, I can order some drinks can put on my earphones to listen to my favorite songs. I just can’t enjoy more of my solo time. Nevertheless, also being forced by the reality, it seems so crucial to cooperate with others, in other words, we can hardly survive without communication and collaboration. For example, Alan Turing, his characteristics made him erratic and unsocial, and this no doubt has cost him a lot of trouble. His head ministers were mean to him, and very unsure to give him heavy responsibilities even though he acted like he was smart, capable and steadfast. His arrogance created little quarrels in his group and finally impeded his work. So, he had to change. He learned more about socialization and tried his best to make friends, and with those partners and friends, he not only had himself, he had backups and that’s the meaning of group work. Human are social animals; we have to break through our comfort zone to meet more people and communicate with them. Hard for introverts, but boundless benefits. Just try to balance solo time and social time, then we’ll be better off.
