During my university years I started collecting books. Among them were classic English literatures like, Dicken's ‘Oliver Twist', Sir Walter Scott's ‘Rob Roy', H.G Well's short stories, O' Henry's ‘Gabbages and Queens' and so on. Some of the books were original and some were the abridged versions and most of them, I would not be able to finish up reading for my English was not up to that. They were heavy and not necessarily appealing to a young mind, but I love them to be with me but I would keep on buying them along with books of my native Burmese writers.
I would make attempts to read these old English books and at intervals would gradually become more intelligent of what they were and what the storylines were about. That was my way of temporarily hiding away from the real world outside when things were messy and hectic, like the times when exams were drawing near. Yes, the nearer they were, the more appealing it was to be at the old books.
At times I would wonder why I had so many English books in my world? There was nobody around to talk to about them or to have a discussion with and the storylines were totally foreign, basically in a different world from mine.
Although, back then, translated books in Burmese were always trendy among a specific group of audience in our country and they were those that were pop or serious fiction. Reading the English classics books were for me, like wandering alone in a magnificent lost land and, as an engineering student at the time, I usually had no one to talk to about how wonderful and strange that lost land was. I came to think of those classics as ‘ghosts in the realm of literature’ and that there was only a small number of crazy outlanders like ourselves who had fallen prey to being haunted.
But surprisingly, in this age of internet, I happily discovered that this had not been the case. Those classics are still, among global book worms, honored and appealing subjects to talk about. And just last year, I saw 'The Count of Monte Cristo ' and 'Rob Roy ' streamed from a paid channel on T.V. The former was better. ‘Rob Roy’ was a little dark.)
Yes, throughout history, human nature never gets old or changes. We are all are connected by that. That is why, at some point or another, we all discover that we are connected after all, by a string called, “the nature of Nature”. Those lost boys and girls (like myself) who had been wandering in the lost land have, all along, been coming together in FB Groups like 'Book Lovers', 'Passions for Books', and 'When We Talk About Books' and many other such sites. *
And while writing this on my phone, images of all things I learned in my life appeared on my mind. In world history, first, Man found fire, then agriculture, then the wheel, and after that, copper and iron, then paper, then the printing press, and so on. And now we have digital smart phones. To me, I am connected to all of this accumulated knowledge, that same technology, namely 'a smart phone'. And that is also part of the ‘nature of the Nature’ we live in.
So, whenever you start something, even at a very remote ‘somewhere’, whether in good way or in bad way, it will connect, at some point to 'some main thing' somewhere else. I have come to realize this and alarmingly, I also see the patterns. Yes, everything is in front of the very eyes of God. And some day they all will come together to a point for ‘the revelation’.
Yes, gradually everything will connect and form a dot. God's dot.
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