Rehab for Chronically Online: it’s me and my books against the world.

嗨大家，我是Noriko。

想了許久想要為自己開啟這個閱讀復健計畫。要做點大事，預備姿勢總是重要，要一做再做，由頭也要一托再托。書還沒讀好，這篇情感濃烈如瓊瑤阿姨的宣言總算是寫好，姿勢擺好了，接下來就要做了。觸及率的關係我將英文文章先擺上，再懇請華語讀者動動手指往下滑一滑。謝謝！也可以追蹤伏流暗湧的脆，上面是華語碎念和更新。

Hi, this is Noriko, the other half of undercurrent.xyz.

I turned 35 this February — a bookish girl became a bookish woman. What has changed is only that the book once glued to my hand has been replaced by an iPhone . So technically, I just became a woman.

The year when iPhone 11 launched, my partner — who lived apart and is now a part of my bedtime — acted all cute and begged me to ditch that flip phone I’d been using out of love for Cillian Murphy. Said it would make our hotline even hotter, affection could be delivered in a more vivid, high-definition sort of way.

Then came the pandemic, and our love did depend entirely on this thing in our hands in the beginning. I did have a laptop, of course — even the latest one — but the late-night video calls felt more intimate in that small, glowing light in the dark. I didn’t escape the virus either. Feverish and drained, sad and desperate. My body couldn’t do much; my brain couldn’t think much. So for that entire month, most of the time I was in the bed, curled on my side like a soon-to-be-baby fetus, cradling a tiny machine that lit my sometimes-pale-sometimes-red face, day and night. A body no longer controlled by free will, and the will itself was anything but free, it was trapped in a waterfall of information: social media and news wrapped in anxieties falling on me at full speed. This was not the kind of Takigyo I signed up for.

How easily a life gets chopped into 30 seconds, one minute, and delivered to my feed. My mood follows, adrift. When masks came off, the damage was done. Dopamine overstimulated, attention hooked, addiction formed. No way back. Inside that black slab, I expected an order sheltered within — a cooperation of values like reasons, discipline and clarity. Instead, a system that runs on disorder. As Hermann Hesse wrote in Steppenwolf: “At many moments the old and the new, pain and pleasure, fear and joy were quite oddly mixed with one another.” Now the entanglement is twining every second, and happiness becomes nowhere man. The fallacy, the myth, the illusion, the ignorance of what is pain and what is joy, what is pleasure and what is fear has framed me. A noble life that seems to have an “intrinsic essence”, that is anywhere else but here, is calling you every time when the black mirror lights up.

I try to set phone-free time for myself every day. My partner and I usually take a little stroll after work. Whenever I touch that block in his butt pocket, I find myself missing mine — the little one lying on the dining table. The addict has my face. The addiction lies in its convenience — you and information are just one fingertip away. A flash of thought, a sudden encounter in life, a question arising inside — signals received but not yet processed — and your finger moves first. Grab your phone, tap, search, fall down the rabbit hole. When you crawl out, an hour has passed in real life. I could no longer tolerate sitting alone with the unknown.

My bookish life fell apart too. My thoughts have always been wandering spirits. Now give them a Nimbus 2000, and distraction becomes the new normal. My reading habit fractaled, and my attention span shattered. Back when I used that flip phone, I didn’t realise it was that fan girl protecting my attention span all along. Although reading was — and still is — a big part of my work, I could still read like that bookish girl outside of work: at least one book a week. Now, apart from the texts I have to read for work, I barely have the initiative to pick up anything else. Not to mention that whole Netflix-bingeing story we all have.

However, I came to realise that a person’s relationship with books ebbs and flows throughout life. Most confusions of the present can’t be answered by a book right away — not all books a dictionary — they only echo back to you later as that eureka. In an age that demands instant feedback, how could a book not feel helpless?

When my partner and I first fell for each other, we were both too busy reading each other. Dates, conversations, sex, meals, texts, calls — the lingering experience and dopamine stimulation of it all was beyond any novel. It occupied the body and the hours once reserved for reading. My relationship with books became like calling home after leaving for college — once a month, if that. Reading one book a month was already a miracle. And then even that drifted. Cuz every resolution to reunite was outpaced by the next change on the Internet.

Is it because I’m tired of my work? I don’t think so. I still love reading those texts written with genuine labour of love. I truly believe that reading any good texts is like maintaining a weapon. It’s an effort to keep watch over the love and peace inside your wonderland. Love, you want it in a million forms and peace has only one answer. The mind is nourished and growing in that wonderland, standing against the world in a state that senses are kept sharp and steady.

Life is full of such unspeakable fragments. Writers pick up those in the swamp and the fog, day after day, pressing against the limits of language — until a reader finds them, recognises herself, and the unspeakable suffering finally releases into a smile. For a while I told myself: the films and TV series I love also have moving texts in them. You can watch them again and again, each time tasting something new in the foreshadowing stitched in so densely it passes as offhand dialogue — bellissimo. I consoled myself: isn’t that enough? Does it matter that I’m not reading? But the unease never quite went away.

What does reading books mean to me ? What does it even mean in this era? I’m not in a state to commit to an answer. What I do know is that reading demands you face it alone, head-on, it requires your time and your soul. In discussion, we have no shared screen to point on; the story takes shape in each reader’s mind, the prose burns to different depths in each heart. You can’t send a comment in chat while reading, can’t read it at double speed, can’t get away with a “three-minute summary so you don’t have to”. But so what? Why read at all?

I just think of the girl I used to be, who could practice piano for eight hours straight and hide under the covers reading throughout the night, completely absorbed. Attentive. Undistracted. I think of that state every time my soul scatters across different sizes of screens. And as Li Bai wrote:

                     “A golden cup, the purest wine, cost ten thousand coins.
                      A plate of solid jade, layered in delicacies, ten thousand coins.
                      Stop —
                      as I toss aside my cup and put down my chopsticks, I cannot eat.
                      So, I draw my sword, I look around, confused and lost.” 
                                                          （Xinglu nan (The journey is hard) , Li Bai, 744 CE)

Faced with endless entertainment streaming, I suddenly have no appetite for any of it.

I’ve been practicing zoning out at the city with the granny next seat during those liminal moments. And then it’s the Takigyo I choose for myself: to keep reading, one book after another.

Reading is like Sisyphus pushing against the immense stone in the void. But if the boulder is the entropic world, then every push is negentropy. As long as I push, I spend more time alone with the stone; I understand people’s ordinariness, their bliss and sorrow, suffering and pain; I see my mediocrity shining, radiating ignorance and crookedness.

As Camus would have it, I refuse to make my peace with myself. The bookish girl never imagined that her literary life in womanhood would be so powerless, taking in all the lack and the decay. I don’t want to disappoint her. I don’t want this life desolate. I want to stay tangled up with books. I want to laugh and rage through them, sometimes obedient, sometimes picking a fight.

I know that as long as I keep reading, I will keep hurting. Sharpening the mind hurts like the growing pains of girlhood, the growing pains of womanhood. Growth is not linear, not quantifiable. How do you even describe her? She shows her face when excavating and discerning the different strata of a life. She’s in that nuance of texture and the joy when you see her may share the same ecstasy as a cicada breaking through the soil after years underground. Ineffable, her face, and yet you must exhaust your own language trying to touch it.

The road is hard, the road is hard, and I’m just too proud to surrender like this. I refuse to let the books on my shelf grow dimmer than the phone and neglected. They might be the products of all kinds of refusal to give in.

As a reader, I must do the work too, only then to do justice to what’s been given to me. So I decide to keep a public reading rehab journal. My imagined eyes of the Other disciplined me all the time. Forcing myself to write as output will definitely push me to read more as input, of course for the sake of the DIGNITY. This journal aka diary would plausibly be record of vibe reading and mood reflecting. No food for thoughts, only feelings to nibble.

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35歲了，從文學少女變成文學壯女。只是手上本來黏著的書，變成了快要放不進口袋的手機，稱自己為文學壯女也是嘴軟。

那一年iPhone 11發布，彼時尚不是固定在枕邊的現任枕邊人撒嬌耍潑求我換下當時因Cillian Murphy而愛屋及烏一直用的翻蓋手機LG Gentle，說是這樣熱線能熱上加熱，能傳輸更具象生動且清晰的愛意。

然後天下大疫，愛意果然全靠手上這隻傳輸。我當然還是有電腦（甚至還是最新款），只是睡前的視訊還是在那個小小的光亮之中更顯親密。而後我也沒逃過染疫的命運，發熱的身軀能做的不多，力氣也不足以支撐小腦瓜做功，於是那個月維持最長的姿勢就是像胎兒一般蜷著身側躺手捧著一台機器日日夜夜照亮時紅時青的臉龐。無法恣意移動的身體，精神也困在手中這個瀑布一樣的資訊流載體，新聞和社群的焦慮都由此超速傳輸，打在我的臉上，而這並不是我想要的修行。

每每輕易就看著被30秒或一分鐘切碎的他人的空間，心中浮浮沈沈。拿下口罩後，多巴胺已超載，癮頭大了，一去不復返。在那塊黑磚裡，我本期望理性，秩序和明晰共同運作，然而這個系統正運作的是一種失序。赫曼赫塞曾在荒原狼裡說的：「在某些時刻，新與舊，痛苦與樂趣，懼怕與歡樂非常奇妙地混雜在一起。」我想不是某些了，也漸漸不知道什麼是奇妙。對苦痛樂趣懼怕歡樂的謬誤，幻視和盲視將我固定住。一種好像有「本質」的「在他方」的「更好」的「高尚生活」化成每一次亮起的呼喚。

我也嘗試過每天給自己沒有手機的時刻，傍晚和枕邊人出門散步，摸到他後口袋突出的方塊，竟也會念想在餐桌上躺著的自己的手機 —— 癮君子逐漸長成自己的模樣。癮頭在於他的便利性，你和資訊就是一個指尖的距離，腦中閃現、生活遭遇，大腦生成的一個信號還未思考，隨手就搜索、查找，爾後掉進兔子洞，一回神一個小時過去了。我再也無法接受與未知共處。

讀書生活也因此發生劇變。想法本就易似天外飛仙，如今飛仙配神器，分神已成常態。閱讀碎片化已不成習慣，或無法專心。用翻蓋手機時尚不明白當時其實用粉絲之愛保護了自己的注意力。雖然閱讀佔了工作很大一部分，然而彼時閒暇還是會根據少女時的習慣翻書，一週能讀完一本自己的選書（言情小說更是一天一本 binge reading）。而今除了工作翻譯必要讀的文本，主動去閱讀的時間是幾乎沒有。（尚且不講後來我們訂閱了netflix這樣大家都經歷的故事。）

後來接受了人和書的關係在人生裡就是時遠時近，當下的困惑多數時候也難以在書中立刻得到解答，只在日後迴響，於是在講求迅速反饋的時代書本又是如何無力自處。和枕邊人熱戀時，我倆都忙於讀懂對方，約會、聊天、做愛、吃飯、簡訊、電話得到的體驗和刺激是任何小說都無法比擬，佔據身體的時間也是實在，和書的關係就像剛上大學離開家，一個月打回家一次一樣，一月讀一本已是奇蹟。後來我們就漸行漸遠，每次下定決心重聚又是決心趕不上變化。

是職業倦怠嗎？我想不是，我還是熱愛閱讀那些被真心對待的文本。我深信閱讀任何好的文本都像是保養槍枝，努力以用來維安心中的愛和和平，前者你要她千變萬化，而後者的答案只有一種，心靈就在靜與動間埋伏滋養生長，以穩定的，感官保持敏銳的狀態面對世界。人生四處充滿了如此難言的片段，而寫作者就在迷霧泥灘裡拾起他們，日復一日地，觸碰語言的邊界，直到被讀者發現，被心有戚戚焉，被予以難言之苦終釋然後的微笑。

有陣子我想，我喜愛的電影和如今的劇集也有令人心動的文本出現，也能在一刷再刷中，次次品味密密縫入的伏筆偽裝成不經意吐露的對話，妙不可言。我也安慰自己，看了這些，沒有看書也沒關係吧？卻也還是心有不安。

閱讀書籍於我而言是什麼？於這個時代又是如何？還不是我下定論的時候。我只知道閱讀的體驗是無論如何你都必須獨自與之正面對決，是時刻面對世界的挑戰之練習。在討論時我們沒有共同的畫面能夠落腳，情節在各自腦海裡成像，文筆在各自心裡烙下不同深淺。沒辦法在閱讀的時候，馬上發一條彈幕評論，沒辦法二倍速，沒辦法三分鐘帶你看完。可是那然後呢？為何非要讀呢？我只是想起少女時可以練琴八個小時，然後躲在被窩裡看整夜書的那個專注的自己。心無旁騖——失去這樣的狀態，總在大中小螢幕間魂遊四散時想起。如同李太白講的「拔劍四顧心茫然」—— 面前形形色色的娛樂刺激，我忽然一個也不想動筷。

我已經練習到可以在等待過渡的時間裡和隔壁座的老奶奶一起對著城市發呆。而接下來我想要的修行是我繼續選擇一本接著一本讀下去。讀書也似西西弗斯推石，因世界是熵增的巨石。只要我一直推，我就越和世界獨處，理解他人之喜悲平淡苦楚，照見自己的無知平庸歪斜熠熠生輝。如卡繆講，我拒絕與自己握手言和。少女時期未曾想壯女時的文學生活竟如此無力，接受所有匱乏和墮落。我不願讓她失望，不願讓生命失落。就要和書廝守摩擦，嬉笑怒罵，時俯首貼耳時生氣打架。我知道只要我一直讀，我也會一直痛，打磨心靈之難如少女時期的生長痛因讀書也將伴我一生。成長畢竟非線性非量化，要怎麼形容呢？她就是在挖掘、辨識出生命不同的地質、質地，即是細微卻在明白開朗的瞬間帶來如蟬破土後的快感，妙不可言也要窮盡自己的語言去觸碰。作為讀者也要認真做功，如此才不負如來不負卿。

行路難，行路難，但其實也就是心有不甘，不甘架上的書光亮黯淡被冷落，他們應該也是各式心有不甘的產物吧，不甘自己再無法細膩體察自身的感受。於是我選擇公開閱讀復健日記，用假想的他人目光來督促自己多讀點書，強迫自己輸出也勢必要為了面子多加輸入。復健日記大概走的會是一個vibe reading和sharing的路線，沒有乾貨，只有感受。