Posted by aivan on August 21, 19102 at 01:07:21:
With the development of the human being during so many thousands of years, the most important thing to man is not so much technology as the culture. Every era has a culture, and every country including the existing and the one had ever been exist has a culture. As a human being, it is necessary to know about the culture. Since poetry, novels, mythology and other types of imaginative literature can to some large extent reflect the culture of those days and those countries, reading them is one of the easiest and some time seems a only way to know a culture, given that not everyone could go to a country at all the era.
By reading these imaginative literature works, we can review the long history of people¡¯s thought: what people like, what about their customs, and their life, the moral standard, and so on which sometimes seems misery to nowadays people. For example, you can find many idioms in an ancient Chinese book which you cannot understand by today¡¯s mind, but if you know the story behind the idioms you¡¯ll find it easy to catch on and very interesting, and from these, you may think something beyond the idioms and the stories----something about the ancient Chinese culture. Moreover, the works of poets, novelists, and many other types of litterateurs can help us learn the depth of the thought of people of the day. We can conclude a development of the thought history of human being by reading their works. To be a human being, everyone should shape a notion that what human being is, not only the human today but also the past, a notion come from the depth of our comprehension of our world.
On the other hand, we can not only know about the notion as a whole group of people, but also can see what the individual mentality from the literature. For instance, the novel ¡°Gone with the wind¡±, which depicts a woman¡¯s life, what we can see is more than the love of the woman, but the life of thousands of thousands individual women and men like she and the people around her during the Civil War of American. What they thought , about the war, about the world about their life, and what they must face, and many parallel things, all these are unimaginable to a person who did not endure that period and would only read from the history book: during xx year, the Civil War broke out. That it is, but is it enough? The thing happened only more than one hundred years ago, but what if it happened thousand years ago? We would know about it even harder, isn¡¯t it? Then we must resort to these literature works as well as the history.
It will be asked that even if we can know people¡¯s real mind from the literature, what should it do? I believe, the most significant function is that these literature works can purify people¡¯s mind, and they can teach us vividly which is right and which is wrong, what is holy and what is based¡ªall that cannot be efficiently done by textbooks. They also lead us a real way to understand people, since we live in a big society where we have to contact with all kinds of people and also where there are many people around us should be loved and be helped. In addition, these works can help us to learn to analyze complicate occurrences since meanwhile reading our experiences will increase. We can know a lot of knowledge that we cannot experience so much in our short lifetime. Reading different periods of the works seems like that we live longer----we ¡°see¡± the construction of the Great Wall, we ¡°listen¡± the calling of the black slaves, we ¡°smell¡± the palatable food in all of the world. What a good and wonderful experience! But we can only get it from these literature books.
If one want to be a real human being, and want to make his or her one-time life worthy and experience as much as possible, it is necessary to read those literature books. Reading can help people catch on better the world of people living, and furthermore, people can predict the future based on the accumulated knowledge and comprehension of culture for thousands of years. In the modern days, more and more people like to take travel. Not only because they want to relax, but also they want to find something that had been experienced or thought by the ancient people, that is the resonance between today and past. Without those literature works, we do not know the past, what only we know is our today¡¯s life, the high developed technologic world, that life is dreary. If like that, the people will not know the mean of their life, only to live, breath, eat and work? No culture, no anything else? No, that¡¯s not we want. We need a integrated development history of human¡¯s idea. Those literature works are the most precious wealth of human being.