Carrying a Book and Walking Around the Park

The driving school situation is getting more and more urgent. After 8 AM, I wolfed down a beef patty and ran over. Finally got a chance to swipe my card, but the time was in the afternoon. So I left the training ground with an empty feeling, saying: “Practicing driving is a waste of time—swiping the card is the real business!”

When I came, I wanted to bring a novel. After 7 AM in the dorm, I opened my Kindle, and a charging prompt popped up on the dim screen. I had no choice but to pick through a pile of books I’d never had the patience to read, went through them twice, and finally chose Influence to bring along. A classmate who saw me often bringing books to driving school and never saw me read much said: “You’re bringing a book to pretend again.” Of course, I didn’t care at all about his opinion, let alone the opinions of the uncles and aunties studying with me. In life, there are always some unrelated people who like to lecture you, wanting you to embrace their deeply ingrained values and views on life. Arguing is useless— the only thing to do is smile with a kind of incurable pity for them. Reading, regardless of initial intentions, as long as the reader persists, their intellectual temperament will be like something finely carved, until even they themselves find it incredible. If a person is willing to read, as long as they have time and it doesn’t affect others, then go read.

So after coming down from the dirt road in front of the driving school, I diagonally crossed a wasteland surrounded by walls, took a wrong turn down a dead-end road, climbed a few steps up a dirt slope without bushes, arrived at the park, and stepped onto the smooth asphalt road. On Saturday, the park had many people—there was even some government agency exercising in formation with red flags. I walked and read along this stretch of road until I reached a car surrounded by a noisy crowd. It turned out that agency was holding a climbing-with-prizes activity and was distributing prizes to participants. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Teacher Zeng up ahead. We chatted for a bit. He said he was just here to climb the mountain. I really wanted to immediately turn around and walk with him, using my graduation project as an excuse to discuss my exam from the night before yesterday. But it felt unreliable, so I ultimately held back. I continued descending the mountain while reading, flipping through dozens more pages of the book. An hour later, I finished circling the park and entered the school.

At noon it was my turn to swipe the card. I brought my Kindle up and read a bit of Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.