My first leisure read

University reading is a lot. There’s 2.5 books to read every week and sometimes I just have to go into class without having read anything (not even spark notes) and count on my smoking ability to get through it. The text I choose to smoke has to be chosen with good reason of course, and more often than not that’s the works of Plato and Aristotle because no offence but I’m sick of hearing about dead Greek men.

Given these conditions, it has been nice to finish my first leisure book – Lost Children’s Archive – given how much academic reading is required. The book is part of required reading for my curriculum, but not due until another 6 weeks so I would consider that leisure read. It is also the only book out of the humanities curriculum that I’ve chosen to buy a physical copy of (it’s just not viable to buy like 20 books), so I’m convinced that something special about this book drew me to it. It might be it’s earthy toned cover (I know don’t judge a book by it’s cover but then what’s the point of the entire print industry in designing nice covers if not to be judged), or it might be the fact that it’s the first and only contemporary writer we have in our syllabus and the idea of being able to read complete sentences without having to reread them seems very attractive. Yet my first leisure read has joined the ranks of my favourite books almost immediately after I started, not just for its beautiful language but also the themes of love, marriage and family that struck so close to my heart.

Hearing is a form of touching from a distance.

The two adults in the book are documentarian and documentarist, specifically for soundscaping. What is the point of recording every trivial sound in our lives, they ask? It is very close to how I would record the sounds for you, from across oceans and way back home, and hope that they convey my excitement, the colours of the day, a way of keeping in touch with our different lives. The lost children in the book don’t have voices and go unrecorded, but I’m no lost child, and I hope my story reaches out to you. The sounds of my day might become an outstretched hand that would stop you suddenly in your tracks and turn your head to me.

Marriage is about generosity.

The family in the book is also one that is falling apart. Where love once was, in a bare apartment called home, on pencil marked walls charting the children’s height, there is only silence now. The adults in the book nonetheless love their children very much and keep giving them so much love, like a stream or leaking tap, and I suspect that is why they eventually run out for themselves or each other. The love to children cannot stop though, because you must keep giving. I think when one runs out of water is where love comes in, and they share their water and revive the spring. That is how any marriage or relationship works. Except, they cannot keep giving, and you must have a fertile soil that can be revived so that it can start producing its own water again. The soil you water must be an engine that can still be jumpstarted. It fails and all falls apart when the water does not come, or it falls on barren unloving soil, and it becomes futile to try any longer for what is already past.

There are many other lessons in this book that made me cry and I had to put it down. Reading my first leisure book was like standing in the Echo Canyon where the children in the book got lost, and shouting your name and hearing it bounce back. Somewhere, suddenly, there is another voice that reverberates in my mind and shocks me that there are others just like me, here, out of sight, and I can only think about how to reach them.