A painting was hung on a wall. A man walks by and stop momentarily to appreciate the art's beauty. The element, composed by different colours, precisely complement each other in ever so harmony. The man couldn't help but to wonder, what makes the painting wonderful? Is it the paint or the painter?
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I once told a friend that if Philosopher A wrote 3 books encapsulating his wisdom and I read all of it plus another book from Philosopher B, then literally I'll be more brilliant than the former. Obviously, it was such a stupid remark and my friend refuted the theory by implying the deuteragonist core of reading: understanding the message. Even if I'm well defined of each word vocabulary and grammar, the real essence of the meaning in between the lines stay within the author experience and thought.
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"I don't know. Well of course leading a predetermined life cycle seems lack in meaning but after all, isn't it the memories we make along the way that matters? The meaning of life is still there though. Look at all these encyclopedias. It is intended as a safe repository of human knowledge, in case a catastrophe swept our civilization and render all technology to dust. Like the ancient cultures of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, at least over time, we leave behind some random surviving fragments of our writing for the future to remember us. Why does it matter for them to remember? So that they won't repeat our mistake. History is to civilization what memory is to individuals. If we forgot what we had done in the past, we lost our meaningful identity as a person. Nobody pays an attention to encyclopedia nowadays, it's mundane and will keep updated over and over again. But it has meaning, like our lives, just that we need time to understand why."
"Well, in the end, we are all a merchant of culture, isn't it?"
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