A Lazy Day for Book Reading

There are only a couple of days before the official beginning of spring (March 21). Various house plants at my home are already hinting the good news by blossoming beautifully. The red amaryllis is really lovely at the moment. How I adore the deep red coloured petals. They remind me of the first amaryllis that my father brought home when we were still living in Hong Kong. Maybe I was much smaller and shorter back then; but in my memory, it always had monstrous huge flowers that were as big as my head.

The temperature is still a bit chilly outside but the fabulous weather makes it a very good time to relax in the living room with a cup of coffee and to finish some reading that I have been putting off for so long. Over the weekend, I was able to finish up the book club reader, “Under the Net” by Iris Murdoch and 2 volumes of the Moomin graphic novels. I even got a head start on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories”.

“Under the Net” is a surprisingly funny novel. Even a slow reader like me could smoothly finish up the novel in a couple of days. It will tell you how much I enjoyed reading the book. The story is filled with unexpected twists and turns, and it seldom leaves me feeling bored. In some ways that it makes me feel that I am in the middle of a TV drama with all the chaotic events that happened in the book. Some of the things that the protagonist did might sound silly and unreasonable at times but the author saved the novel by throwing in some philosophical questions in there to keep the book on the ground. I enjoyed this book as a pure love story and it also offers me some curious questions to think about.

In some point of the novel, the protagonist held the following conversation with his seemingly philosophical friend:

Hugo: “The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.”

Jake: “What would happen if one were to speak the truth? Would it be possible?”

Hugo: “I know myself, that when I really speak the truth the words fall from my mouth absolutely dead, and I see complete blankness in the face of the other person.”

Jake: “So we never communicate?”

Hugo: “Well, I suppose actions don’t lie.”

In some ways, I agree with Hugo that the purest truth actually resides in our mind instead of speech or in any other written form. Once it is written out, it’s no longer the truth since we often process it and make it as socially acceptable as possible. The original meaning might be all gone after all the polishing. He believed that instead of using a flowery language, we should probably communicate via action since “actions don’t lie”. I wish this book is a required reading for our fellow politicians. Instead of spending so much money on self promotion, maybe some real action will help Canadians to put more faith in the government?