Reading Comfort Books

The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known. Kenko, Essays in Idleness

You come home at the end of a long day

from work or school. You drop your body onto a sofa or an easy

chair, then reach for the remote to flick on the TV set, hoping to

catch a programme to distract your mind.

Don't do that, for goodness sake!

Instead, do what I do:

I have a scattering of comfort books lying about the house; so when body and mind are stressed out, I pull one of the volumes, flip it open at no particular page, and read whatever I find.

Comfort books can be of any category or genre -- old-loved novels or short story anthologies, armchair travelogues, memoirs, a scattering of poems, one of Buddha's Discourses ... Whatever volume with evergreen content that gives you a cheer, a smile or a reflective pause.

Some of my early favourite are those written in the 1930s by Dr Lin Yutang, scholar, educationist, bestselling translator of Chinese classics into English, and laidback observer of life. His own English-language works include Moment in Peking (novel of life and customs in China 1900-30s), Importance of Living and Wisdom of China (anthology). I also enjoy his translation of Six Chapters of a Floating Life (autobiography of an 18th Century scholar who fails in official society but wins in love).

Other comfort books include Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book (which I tried to emulate in my diary-writing as a student), The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett, Emily Dickinson's poetry, James Joyce's Dubliners short stories (but not his incomprehensible Ulysses), Rumi's poems, Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, Virginia Woolf's essays and her novella, Mrs Dalloway, William Wordsworth's and Samuel Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, William Hazlitt's Essays and Rudyard Kipling's rhyming poems and short stories.

These are what I call "Level 2 works". They are more limited in scope than the grander, verbose Level 1 tomes of great heft (Aristotle and Augustine come to mind) that take forever to plough through. Level 2 books are slim, at most 200 pages. They are easy to read, easy to remember and easy to finish. And they remain fresh despite constant re-reading.

But I find a quieter, deeper pleasure reading Buddha's lucid and utterly sensible discourses as recorded in the Dharmapada, the Pail Tipittaka, the Diamond Sutra, and others; as well as Bodhidharma's Sermons, Padmasambahva's Sermons, the Platform Sutra of Hui Neng, the intense, single-page Heart Sutra, and the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation from the Bardo.

I'm too indolent to take up project management or climb Mount Everest. I detest golf and most of the people -- politicians and potbellied businessmen -- playing the fakey sport (I was surprised, though, to read in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, that schoolgirls in early 20th Century Scotland enjoyed golf.)

So, I curl myself with a book from those hundred-odd pencil-thin volumes on shelves and dark corners in my house. They are always ready to share a chat, an anecdote or a well-turned idea. Most of the titles can be purchased from Amazon.com, including Lin Yutang's out-of-print books.

And hostage from the future took

In trained thought and lore of book.

-- John Greenleaf Whittier, Snow-bound, A Winter Idyl

Francis Chin

Singapore, Vesak Day, June 2, 2004

The Excerpts

On this Web site, I have chosen mainly from relatively obscure Level 2 works, but the excerpts are nevertheless masterpieces in language, ideas and insight. More excerpts will be posted once I can set aside enough idle time to scan, OCR and edit the text.

Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Caesar Excerpts

Knowing the happiness of fish Excerpts from Chuangtse, translated by Lin Yutang

Happy endings Life has many happy endings, by James Allen, As a Man Thinketh

Romance of the Western Chamber It is that brief look she gave me that bedevils me...

Moment in Peking Life & love in China early 1900s, by Lin Yutang

The Haunted Simla Road Khushwant Singh

We wander at our own sweet will The byways of Simla, by Anne MacLeod

Sagittarius Rising Life in the sky by Cecil Lewis

The Road to Oxiana Travel in Afghanistan, Persia and the Middle East

A Month in the Country Life's intimacy in an English village

Essays in Idleness The pleasure of doing nothing

Dhammapada Living mindful, wholesome lives