My soul my book

One year, an American boy was admitted to Harvard University -- to study engineering. He was very happy. The first-year curriculum at Harvard, like many American universities, has a core curriculum. The so-called core courses are common courses that new students are required to attend, not specialized courses. So the student took a class, and then he regretted it. What courses did you take? It's Middle English Literature. If you think about it, a student who wants to study engineering, goes to study Middle English literature, so it's very painful.

What's more, the professor was old, spoke slowly, and the class was boring and uninteresting. The student was miserable and felt that he could not attend the class. It was too painful, so he often skipped school. He was very happy to have the summer vacation after finishing the semester. He needed to do part-time jobs to earn money, so he took a part-time job in a used bookstore near his school.

What is he doing? It was his job to get calls to collect old books from people's homes and sell them. Not to get an estimate, but to go to the door and see how many boxes and how many people would have to carry the books -- and help with that.

One day, he got a call from his boss, who sent him to carry books from a garden house -- a nice house -- near the town of Boston and Cambridge in the United States, where Harvard is located. So he went, and an old lady opened the door and ushered him in. The old lady's face was a little sad, and on introduction he discovered that she was the wife of his dreary Middle English literature professor, who had died shortly after the end of the semester. When he dies, he leaves a room full of books. What happens to them? The old lady felt that the books in the room were a reminder to her, and she could not face them every day, so she decided to sell them all, and so she sold them to this used bookstore, and this young man happened to be sent to collect them. Then the young man realized that the course he had just finished last semester was the professor's last, and that he was one of the professor's last students. Although he did not like the professor, he felt very heavy at this time. When he went to see how the books should be carried, he found that on one side of the professor's study, a whole wall of bookcases was covered with detective stories, and they were all cheap detective stories (there were a lot of books in English that were cheap, cheap, and poorly printed). The student laughed. This old fellow is usually very serious in class. His favorite reading is detective novels. How can he have such an interest? He thought it was funny. This study is very elegant, behind the study is a big floor-to-ceiling glass door, out is a small garden, not very luxurious, but very clean, elegant, also very comfortable, beautiful. He was looking at the garden when he heard the old lady say, "My husband's favorite hobby was growing flowers and cutting grass. He loved studying it."

Next to the glass door there were one or two bookcases filled with gardening books. Including plant guides, all kinds of books to introduce plants, flowers and grass essential. After reading for a long time, the student made a decision: I will not carry these books today! He had come to see how many books there were and had someone come to carry them, but now he drove back and said to the proprietor, "Sir, I want to buy all this professor's books myself -- where shall I put them? I don't know. I'm not going to fit in my dorm room, so I'll think of another way -- I'm going to buy them all anyway." The boss said, "Do you want all these books? Can you afford it?" All the money I earned working here this summer is yours, and you don't need to pay me. The boss said, "That's not enough." The student said, "Well, I'll work for you for the next three summers, and I'll give you all the money, okay?" The boss asked him, "Why did you buy these books?" The student said that in his usual class, he only thought the professor was boring and academic, which only reflected the professor's side. When he went to the professor's home, looked at his study, looked at his collection of books, he discovered the professor's complete three-dimensional personality. The professor likes cheap versions of detective stories with underlined notes -- and vulgar words in the notes: This is a damn good paragraph! The professor also liked to grow flowers and grass, the lawn sprinklers had just been spilled, and the leaves were still dripping with water, all of which were his favorite things in life.

A person's hobbies, interests, even hobbies (maybe hobbies in the eyes of some people is a shortcoming), all thoroughly emerge in the professor's study. The student had a strong sense that if I moved these books back to the used bookstore, I would have to disperse them and sort them on the used bookstore shelves before selling them. In this way, the professor's entire library collapsed and disintegrated. And now when the books were in their master's study, they were whole. What does the whole mean? These books fully express the personality and soul of their owners. So the student feels that as long as the professor's collection is still there, as long as the books are still intact together, the professor is not dead, his soul is still in the books. These books contain notes, or a ticket to a concert, or a movie -- these are the tracks of a person's life, reflected in these books. The student felt very sad, very sad. He felt that he should keep the professor's soul intact -- buy it, don't break it up! After listening to him, the store manager said, "Well, I'll give you a 60% discount on these books, and you'll only have to work here for three years." So he worked here for three years. The story is true.