Log 5, Anxious people

 

    Hello, this is Carolyn again. Here comes my fifth log. This time, I will introduce the " second" English novel in my life to you, called "Anxious people." This book is quite a quirky novel according to the writer's style, but I genuinely love it. The reason is that almost all the author's arguments hit my heart straight to the point. Unlike "Flipped," I haven't seen the plot on Netflix this time; I chose this book was only appealed by its name.

    This book seems to be written by the method of "flashback." When I first read it, I admit that I felt a little absurd and funny, especially the interrogations that answered beyond questions and the stories played in reverse order. I even felt puzzled and had the impulse to give up my understanding. Nevertheless, the author's clever technique supported me to continue reading, and the more I read it, the matter in my heart seemed to have been explained and gradually entered the story in the book. This book mainly focuses on "a bank gun robber and a failed hostage-taking farce." But honestly, the robbery is precisely not the critical incident in the story, which seems like a medium that leads the audience to figure out its significant purpose. 

     "This story is about many things, but mostly about idiots." This is a sentence that the author attracted my attention on the first page. When I saw this sentence, my first reaction was to laugh, and it aroused my desire to know why the author would say so after a few seconds. My attention is not on the robbery incident, and I pay more attention to the hidden meaning in the author's words and sentences. As follows, another sentence touched me again, "It's always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is." After reading it, I fell into a series of questions about "being a person." In my opinion, being a human is not exactly a difficult thing for us; however, the main question is why being a human uses simplicity and difficulty to judge? People often complain, " life is so tough. how could we live such a life with lots of ordeals? " Actually, what makes people's lives feel tough and say these words does not come from themselves, but from the people and things that make them have these emotions. Anything can embarrass people, but what has been hindering people is the haunting "emotion" behind it.

    Next, I would like to share my personal insights based on the issues I have mentioned above. Emotion is a very polar manipulator. When we have positive emotions, the energy and atmosphere we exude can render all the things around us, and it can also make us show the best smile and speak beautifully to all things. However, when negative emotions take over us, they will cover everything we see with a thick dark cloud, and all the extreme and vulgar words and emotions will always appear in our minds. To sum up, we can find that most of our behaviors are guided by emotions. Perhaps after reading this, you may think that this has nothing to do with the "difficult of being a human" mentioned by the author. Everyone has different views and practices on everything, and we often only see things from our own perspective. Therefore, we often use the stories we have experienced and our own thinking logic to judge what a person does with emotions, which confirms the author's words, "It's always very easy to declare that other people are idiots" There's no doubt that we judge other people's behavior as an effortless thing. More, we often forget to explore why people have these behaviors and emotions behind them. When we consider things too subjective, we ignore, "What would we do if we were them?" Sometimes our subconscious behaviors are more absurd than theirs, and at this time, are we still qualified to laugh at others? In my life experience, I have usually used subjective judgment to judge what others have done, and I will always say something like, "I think you should...." However, looking back now, I always feel that the opinions I put forward were too self-righteous. When we put forward ideas, we can think from the other party's perspective, then any kind of ironic word may not appear.

    In fact, I spent a lot of time pondering the meaning of the text because the opinions put forward by the author in this book are very worth repeating and thinking about. Thus, it allowed me to gradually grasp the author's thinking logic in the following articles. Although I still have a clue about the robbery, I want to know the most about an episode memory in the text, which is about a man standing on a bridge ten years ago. The process of suicide was witnessed by a teenage boy, a young police officer after a decade. In the text, the author uses uncomplicated language to describe this memory, which makes me wonder if this memory is related to the robbery case. I consider it as the starting point of this book's " anxiety " factor. So far, I can't summarize the critical points of this farce because the dialogues in the book are somewhat nonsensical, and the psychology of perspective changes frequently, so I will try my best to continue to dig down. Indeed, I am eager to know what is going on. For example, "Caused this robbery," "why is this robbery so absurd?" and "why the answer from the hostage could be so nonsense?"