Surviving the City

Yesterday was spent in the city, after trying to get into it for a few hours, then finally finding a way via a sideroute to a Skytrain station and from there into the centre. The roads were rot-thik with traffice for hours. It was a good day in town in that I knew my way around and zipped from sky-train station to skytrain station and down into the streets and round about, then met Wanyi and in the late afternoon we cruised the giant Kinokinuya Bookshop in Siam Paragon and I picked up some Yukio Mishima books to read: Thirst for Love, the Golden Pavilion, and also the first book of his big series The Sea of Fertility. Some deep and somewhat dark text. 50 years after being written, his works are still fresh, beautiful, and still as profoundly disturbing as well. Kinokinuya Bookshop is great and like other bookshops in SE Asia and in China, they seem to take up some of the roles of a public library -not that you can borrow books, but its quite the norm to sit on a comfy seat in the shop and read all day, study, make notes etc. I recall seeing this in a Beijing bookshop -full of after-school kids, cramped on every step of the stairway between the floors, reading reading reading. Its great, the silence of that studious intensity. I was thinking of the term: 'they're reading and reading as if there is no tomorrow' but really, they're reading and reading because there is a tomorrow, many tomorrows.