In the ending page of this great book -- the one that would change my life -- is my own, private and painful story. It is a surgery -- or dissection of myself. Once and again the idea slippered through my mind but I just didn't know how to perform this terrible. As I felt the pain, I stopped. Most of the time I just pretended I've finished this process.
I am too good at, and apt to, pretending.
My childhood memory is so vague and supressed that even I could recall that I once wrote on a primary school homework that "my dream is to become a biologist or astronomer in the future", I just don't know why. Perhaps I didn't know why as well at that time. One thing for sure is that I loved animals, plants, stones, and the universe, although I never tried strenuously to remember those names. The little mind was once filled with curiosity towards the nature and the world. It was more a desire for passive exploration rather than an intellectual interest. Neither did I try to further develop this interest in the field or laboratory. I enjoyed only finding them in books and documentaries, and even scientific novels, and then exploring them -- half-real and half-fictional -- in my imagination. Until I understand what exactly a "natural historian" or a "biologist" (and the more disillussioned one "biological scientist" do, I realized that I could never become any of them. It's no more than entertainment. I am not even learning. I don't even ask questions when I going through those things. I don't care. I am only enjoying them as curiosities. Not very different from something fictional.
There was even a period when I suddenly became obssessed with environmental issues, in a very sensational way. I read lots of factional works; Jane Goodall was my role model. The "passion" was short-lived. Perhaps it once made me felt morally strong; it activated my floating idealism. Perhaps later on I just felt discouraged that I have no means to save any species. I did nothing environmental, but I wrote a lot about it in school essays or notes. I took out vocabulary and sentences that I loved -- rhetorical, descriptional and fanciful -- and kept at least two notebooks full of excerpts. What I read were all reflected in my writing style at certain moment.
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