The Joy of Thinking
Twenty-five years ago, when I went to the countryside to join the army, I brought a few books with me, one of which was Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the men on our team turned it over and over and over, so that it looked like a roll of seaweed. Then someone from another team borrowed it, and I saw it again in several different places later, and it got worse and worse. I believe the book was eventually lost to view. I still can't forget the miserable state of the book. The life in the camp was hard, not enough to eat, not enough to get used to the soil, many people got sick, but the biggest pain was the lack of books to read, if there were many books to read, "The Metamorphosis" would not have disappeared so tragically. On top of that, there is no pleasure in thought. I'm sure I'm not alone in this experience: sitting under the eaves in the evening, watching the sky slowly darken, feeling lonely and desolate, feeling deprived of your life. I was a young man at the time, but I was afraid to live on and age like this. In my opinion, this was something more terrible than death.