我喜欢看书

I'm watching the smoke curl from my mosquito-repelling coil, and wishing the insects were as quick to clear the room as the students are from campus.  The University has turned into a mass exodus.  Everybody lit out of here like there was a fire under them, in a rather soothing turn of events for me.  I finished teaching over a week ago, got all my grades completed quickly, and am currently trying to work on something I have yet to master:  patience.

If everything goes as planned I'll leave Sunday afternoon for Beijing, spend a little less than a week, then get ready to go back to America in a gratifyingly small number of days.  Mostly I'm spending my days reflecting on this year and counting the number of seconds until I get to see my sister.  Looking back over this year I can see an uncomfortable number of things I wish I had done differently, but am rewarded by the realization that some things could not have been better.  I know that when I get back, people are going to want me to tell them what my year has been like and I feel frozen in an inability to convey anything real about the vast and unexplainable China.  I can find words, but not sentences they could fit.

I've turned to reading to recuperate, under the illusion that every breach in my life can be patched with a good book.  So far I have not been disappointed.

"We read for those important moments when literature gives us words for what we are: the words for what we did not know we were.  In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.  Like the night sky in the greek poem, I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see.  Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."

-C.S. Lewis