Books and creativity are fading away together and leaving us happy-fish'd

I first read "The Adventures of a Cricket" by To Hoai when I started learning Vietnamese. At that time, my limited Vietnamese vocabulary made it difficult for me to imagine the story the author was telling.

The Vietnamese words lifted from the coffee-colored pages up to my eyes, then through my brain from where they were translated into English. It was then and there the meaning of each sentence was absorbed, but the story appeared sluggish and hazy.

Now, I sat down to read it again and I was able to see the picture in the theater of my mind.

"Mi, a hungry cat. Smooth black fur, skinny, with a miserable look, his green eyes were very mischievous, cunning, a scoundrel and a prowler".

I sat captivated while reading this story. I felt happy and content here drinking coffee at the book street, the place I liked to collect fictions, extensive invisible worlds encased within classic works of literature.

Once, I found an old novel in the second-hand book section. The cover was wrinkled, the corners were curled like a dog's ear. The Gormenghast series, written in 1946, amazed me with its ability to recreate a world more vivid and imaginative than a Tim Burton movie, but by the written word. For example, the author describes villainous twin sisters:

"They are still in Darwin's waiting room, their brains are so weak that if they have a thought, they may have a cerebral hemorrhage. Their bodies are so frail that their purple dresses do not seem to contain nerves and tendons, but are simply hanging on hooks."

As I read, I saw the characters in my mind as twisted puppets moving around the lavish castle with absurd clumsiness and their gaunt, listless bodies alive inside me, more alive than any film could copy.

But such picturesque descriptions, such wonderful metaphors, have lain untouched for many years. How many readers have no idea what a beautiful universe they have passed by? Most people would be daunted by a thick, heavy, old book like this, but this is truly an all-time classic.

Great writers need great readers, and regrettably, they are both fading like candles softly into darkness.

I see old books as treasure. Books you read and suddenly stop, look up and smile in amazement at the information brought to life through the story. These dusty old books make me feel thoughtful, that is, full of interesting thoughts collected while adventuring between the pages.

For this reason, I am grateful that my parents filled the house with books, the bookshelves furnished every room like paper walls.

In a study called "Scholarly culture: How books in adolescence enhance adult literacy, numeracy, and technology skills in 31 societies," the authors surveyed 160,000 adults between 2011 and 2015, and found that having just 80 or more books in the home was associated with significantly higher levels of literacy, numeracy and ICT skills.

I brought old books to school. I remember hiding behind a bookshelf in my geography class so the teacher wouldn’t see me reading.

In the old days, British authors used to write books about adventure and exploration before the invention of television and photography. Before the internet became a way of traveling in place, books were the vehicle that took us on our travels far away and over the seas. Books like Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel "Erewhon".

"Erewhon" has the protagonist discover and explore a fictional country. I traveled with him as the author used the land to satirize Victorian England and the hubris of humanity. "Erewhon" is the kind of book where you set it down, think deeply, and consider the content, and smile to yourself wistfully.

Samuel Butler was one of the first writers to write about artificial intelligence with the idea of machine consciousness and self-replicating machines.

The recent movie "Dune", based on Frank Herbert's 1965 novel, has big ideas that came from reading "Erewhon", from where Herbert termed the Butlarian Jihad, the elimination of artificial intelligence. Samuel saw the constant development of technology as worrisome at a time when technology was only just beginning to change after hundreds of years of very slow development. He predicted that machines would surpass humans and humans would become their livestock.

Samuel was very thoughtful in the year 1872.

People glance through books on display at stores along Nguyen Van Binh Book Street in HCMC's District 1. Photo by VnExpress/Quynh Tran

I read "Erewhon" in Geography class, traveling to those distant lands throughout the semester. One day, the teacher angrily pulled aside the bookshelf, revealing that I was reading during his class. He loudly told the entire class that I had four weeks to complete all the assignments and that I had only a 51% chance of passing.

After completing my homework just in time, I confided to my teacher: "If geography textbooks were as well-written as my fantasy books, I would be the best student in the class."

But things are different now. The world has changed a lot. Books are old things, slowly becoming relics of a bygone era.

I sat pensively at the coffee shop on the Book Street. Besides me, 14 out of 15 people were on their phones, mostly playing games. The 15th person was a young woman who talked non-stop but probably did not really say anything meaningful. Her husband sitting next to her must have agreed with me because while she was talking to him, he was playing a game on his phone.

Oxford Dictionary chose "brain rot" as the word of the year 2024, referring to the decline in intelligence and mental health caused by consuming too much trivial, toxic content online.

But despite this warning, I still see people happily accepting such short-term habitual entertainment.

I am not at all skeptical of Samuel's prediction that people will become cattle for machines as I already see the destruction of human reading ability due to reduced concentration. Meanwhile, with his imagination alone in 1872, Samuel Butler drew the whole future of humanity with just the power of the mind.

Reading books stimulates the imagination and the human imagination is like a theater of the mind. Without imagination, we are just stuck in a happy fish brain, no creativity, just copy and paste, like, heart, and subscribe.

*Jesse Peterson is an author who has published some books in Vietnamese, including "Jesse Cười", "Funny Tragedy: adding color to life".