The words of a Nobel Literature Prize winner, Gao Xingjian, from the Front Page Sections, translated…
The Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Gao Xingjian pointed out yesterday, that in order to become more creative, people must get an assortment of information from all sources, read more. Like himself, he doesn’t let books of sciences escape through his fingers, he’d made perfect scores in his middle school physical science and mathematics courses. He’d sighed that in this internet-oriented time, the bookstores are shutting down, one by one, and, a book would sometimes, get reduced, to just a simple sentence, that it takes a lot, to accumulate the knowledge from life, that the younger generations must continue to get educated in the university lecture halls.
Kao, who has a French passport, is the very FIRST Asian Nobel Literature Prize winner, Taiwan Teacher’s University had hired him to be a lecturer, and for four years they’d asked him to head over to the school auditorium to hold discussion forums with the students. At yesterday’s lecture, he’d reminded the over three hundred members of the faculty and student, that humans can’t reverse the effects of the development of modern day technology, “it’s awkward, to not use a cell phone now”; but, being reliant on the internet can cause the information received to become scattered and fragmented, and the younger generations still needed to read more books.
Kao said, that not only in literature, the arts, but also industrial designs, technical realms, as well as in management, you will need to be creative, and, the best way to think creatively is by reading an assortment of books on various subjects and topics. Take him for instance, he’d read just about any and everything since he was young, even the astronomies, the physics, he was really into, he’d made perfect scores in his middle school physical science, as well as mathematics too; he also played the violin, and is a stage actor too.
He said, that the younger generations are filled with energy, they should study more, when he was in college, the school gave each student just FIVE library cards, and, they could only use a card, to check out one book, and he could only get one novel, with his own card. So, he’d borrowed the library cards of a lot of his classmates, and, as he’d gone into the libraries, he’d picked out a stack of books to check out, and, when he didn’t have any class, he’d gone into the library to stay, read through the collections, and, this experience from his earlier days became the source of his writing inspirations later on.
The dean of the Liberal Arts Department, Chen asked Kao, how can they face this new information technology age, with the influx of computers, cell phones?
Kao said, that we should NOT avoid it, and deny the influences of modern day technology advances, cell phones are very convenient, so, why not use them? But, he’d also reminded, that with the advances in technology, that doesn’t mean, that we are moving forward, that we’re getting more and more intelligent.
He’d sighed, that there are less and less people who are reading now, and that the physical bookstores are shutting down one by one in Europe and America. In the information technology age, the human mind became simpler and simpler still, and, a book would get simplified and reduced to no more than one single sentence. But, can one single sentence represent everything that a book has to offer? The technological tools can not replace the learning processes, in order to gain the knowledge, one must put in the hard work, and, learning and spreading the knowledge from the universities is still very necessary.
And so, due to this modernization, the need for books, you know, with the bindings AND the pages that you can PHYSICALLY flip through, is reduced, plus, we can get information on EVERYTHING online, which, is why, there’s a reduction of needs for books, and an overreliance on internet to get our information and that, is very bad!
Life, the Obstacle Course 