The Enduring Solace of Literature

I found the essay below clearing out my iCloud drive under the title: 'Why I chose (to study) Literature'. With Hong Kong currently burning, I hope it's a worthwhile share.

The most elementary reason is simply that I love reading. No, that's a lie. I don't love reading in the same way I don't love breathing. Both are vital. From a young age, weekly trips to the local library meant alternate worlds and lives were my sole source of leisure and pleasure. I slept with books piled next to my head. I preferred paperbacks that rustled but weren’t yellowed and gave off an old car smell. To be dramatic, books became an intrinsic part of how I understood myself, my identity. As I grew up, books evolved from being mere playmates with whom I passed my time to older, wiser mentors who taught me how to live. But I only understood what reading and literature really meant to me after the trees.

The day before I left Hong Kong and university behind, they destroyed the banyan trees. They were twins, flanking a forgotten university gate at the curve of an impossibly narrow path. On my way to classes, I stepped over their knotted roots and ducked to avoid their supple trunks, twisting towards the sky. The sight of those wooden knots prevailing over the concrete and its soaring foliage a kaleidoscope of green gave me a moment of stillness in a city and degree that was constant and grating. I always thought to photograph them, so I could keep their graceful rebellion in my pocket. For the grey ugly days, I would have proof that stubbornness can break even the toughest concrete. I thought they would still be there the next day, and the next. And my silent, tilted companions greeted me each day my classes piled on. My personal symbols of endurance and beauty amidst a particularly crowded and heavy semester. Small comfort in a whirlwind of crippling self-doubt. But I never did, because they were always there. As constant as the open bay and the smell of old dog piss.

The Banyans had been around for lifetimes before me, there was no reason to suspect they would not survive for lifetimes after me. And yet, as soon as the semester was over, without warning, men in helmets came and sliced them in two. I saw it on the news on my grandma’s dusty TV set. The neon of the safety jackets violating the cocoon of familiar green. They posed too much danger to pedestrians, the helmets decided. The community would be safer without them.

I watched in numb horror. I felt that eerie feeling one does when seeing a familiar thing appear on a television screen. There is an initial thrill of recognition, and then a warped feeling that hovers between indignation and embarrassment. A grief arises from the sudden realisation that something you felt to be intimately yours was in fact everyone else’s, and the inexplicable discomfort of being exposed without your permission. I have never been a tree hugger. But I would have chained myself to the trees to preserve the way I’d rather things to be.

No, they weren’t safe. They were powerful, unruly things that flourished in the squalid air of an unrelenting city. They symbolised Hong Kong, this miracle city that grew from barren rocks through sheer tenacity. I saw them on the way to the airport, hacked up and stripped. The tops of the raw trunk stubs stubbornly facing the skies. The images now live together in my memory—the proud trunks leaning dangerously close to the earth, swathed in green and shadows; and the reduced stumps with their insides exposed. They remind me of lessons learnt: that comfort is found in beauty is found in utter ordinariness. And it can be taken away, violently and without warning.

This is the gift of Literature. This habit of gleaning beauty, meaning and purpose from the otherwise mundane. Great works of literature don’t just help us navigate this weird earthly adventure we all share, they show us the the thrill of what it means to be able to participate in it. To always be both attuned to and in awe of the moments of beauty always waiting to be stumbled on, underlying the routines of the everyday — the tilt of a tree, or the way the light plays with roofs at sunset, or the gurgling rumble of the train tracks tugging you home.

Literature taught me the comfort only found in beauty, the embrace of imagined lives which resonated so deeply with my own. Amidst the dark uncertainty we all grapple with in the faceless chain of tomorrows, literature reminds us we are not—or ever will be—truly alone in feeling our way through the unknowability of our own lives. That the immutable uncertainty and our own perceived failures are common to the human experience. Choosing to embrace literature is choosing to look for, cherish, and celebrate the beauty in the quiet moments that make up a life. As Eliot put it, 'trifles make the sum of human things'.

So this, this memory of slaughtered trees and its importance in my life, explains, in part, why I chose literature. It's so I can glean meaning from things that happen around me. So I can participate instead of float through. So I can feel less alone.