I used to dream a lot, and spent most of my time in books before high school. Sometimes I bring my own books, sometimes I just find random books from school shelves. I read almost everything, from romantic novels to secret intelligence documentation. For one day, I’m an unmarried woman from 18th-century England; the next day, I boarded the spaceship and flew into the boundless cosmos. The time I most often read them is during math class, which probably explains why I’m ending up in this completely non-mathematical program. But it is also hard to blame myself as experiencing thousands of different lives sounds much interesting than plain numbers and formulas. Just like it cast me that I would never learn mathematics, reading also shaped much of my childhood. I thought I would always love to imagine, hiding myself in places the real world could never find. That is also how I remember reading, I remember it as an experience through imagination. To experience a whole lifetime within just a few hours was, to my childhood self, nothing but a miracle. I always feel that there is a door opening while reading, it feels a bit like The Chronicles of Narnia– as Lucy opened the wardrobe, while I opened the cover.
However, it quickly changed after the Internet. Actually, I got my first ever phone in the 5th grade, but the early internet was a boring place for a kid. I guess back then it was not developed enough or even did not want to attract someone like me, therefore I was safe from it for a couple of years. If I have to think about why the changes, I could only give a cliché as an answer – I grew up. I was far away from my carefree childhood era, and there was some pressure I had to face. Maybe I was not even grown enough to know what pressure really means, I just know that I want to run away from it, I want to look away. Reading books is probably still a way, but jumping into the internet is much quicker and easier. I just have to open a little screen, and the whole world comes to me.
At first, it was an overwhelming joy; there is no need to imagine experiencing but to see different lives. The Internet, in its early form, was crazily wild for me, everything was behind a little click and anything could be found there. As if the only thing I have to do is to know how to find them. I was obsessed with the world it brings together, from thousands of miles away or to within arm’s reach – I found myself a new Narnia, where I could witness all the magic. In comparison, books seem verbose and clumsy. You may have to spend a couple of hours getting into a person’s inner heart and have absolutely no clue what the outcome for this journey could be – if you have read Ulysses, I’m sure you get what I mean (if you haven’t, please try!). But the internet makes everything crystal clear. Certain key words linked to another, weaving into a map of meaning that promised certainty. If you think the internet is far more uncertain, offering only an illusion — I have to agree. But that was something I realised much later.
The joy was starting to fade away when I was getting into college. Even though I have thrown away my habit of reading books for a long time, I always feel those books are still with me. I used to have a passion with nowhere to vent, as if given a blank of paper, I could fill it all up with my words. With time, I found myself writing less and less. Sometimes I open a blank document and just sit in silence with it. I tried to write something, but always deleted everything in the end. I couldn’t even recognise myself, as all my past aura has become like the ivy outside the window, slowly withered away. I realised what’s actually gone is my ability to dream. The internet was not only a new Narnia – it was also its undoing, dissolving the wardrobe door until there was no threshold left to cross. When everything comes so easily, I seem to forget that expression itself can only be cultivated by time and heart. The internet has taken my imagination, as there is no need to imagine anymore – there is always a written answer with some truth online. However, the magic of imagination is in its uncertainty, if everything is too certain, it sounds like a synonym for boring. It also sounds like against the real world, where things orbit around facts and figures, never about unfinished dreams. Am I growing into the same person I never want to be? But I do know I spend too much time in boring, now I’ve already lost my way to Narnia.
Throughout the years, I wrote about everything else in the world, I wrote about feminism, consumerism and post-modernism, but never about myself. Partially, I’m afraid, I don’t know what to say; every answer I can think of falls short of perfection. There was a time when time capsules were popular. I’m grateful that my past self never thought of leaving even a single word for the future me – for I would have no idea how to bear them now. But at least now I could say I’m trying. Last week I was still writing about facts and figures, with maybe some way how we think about the world, but for this one I was trying to only write about myself. It feels genuinely like a relief, although I can obviously feel the struggle when I am trying to organise my words. I know I’m still longing for that perfect answer but maybe try first walking close to it. Or perhaps there is no answer at all, I just need to find the wardrobe again.
Reference
Title from J. D. Salinger (1941) but actually not have much to do with it because it is about my own heart in a broken story.
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