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My encounter with one of you, last night
Not sure if this is allowed in this sub, but it was a magical moment, please allow me to share.
I (a mid-30s guy) went to a local indie movie theatre on Friday evening to watch Wong Kar Wai's "In the Mood for Love". I sit down, pull out the book that I am currently reading now - The Faerie Queene - and started going through it. I can understand enough of it to get what's going on in the plot and guesstimate what they are trying to convey, but need assistance (chatgpt) to understand the deeper meaning.
This hobby - non-major movies and books - is a hobby that only I seem to enjoy out of my circle of friends, and it can be very lonely at times, to think that I don't have anyone else to talk to about these things.
So I'm sitting there, reading this big ass book I half understand, and I hear tapping noise behind me. I ignore it, but it continues, so I turn around. I see a woman, a bit older than me, and she goes "You are reading the Faerie Queene! I majored in English literature. Are you a student?" I told her that no, I'm just reading it because I want to, and she couldn't believe it, said nobody reads The Faerie Queene just because they want to. I told her that, honestly, I'm struggling a bit, maybe you can help me a little after the movie is done. She laughed and said okay.
After the movie is over, I catch up with her. We are two people on a busy sidewalk, I'm showing her my Goodreads, explaining I grew up in Korea so I read all the Eastern classics and wanted to understand Canadian culture and eventually build up to read the Ulysses by reading all the Western classics. I've been at it for years, starting with Iliad and Odyssey, Aeneid and other Greek/Roman stuff, the entire Bible with annotation, just read The Magic Mountain... and had read Divine Comedy and Morte D'Arthur, and felt ready to tackle The Faerie Queene, but the combination of it being in old English and being poetry made it difficult.
She said something along the lines of:
I know you do this for your own sake, but you don't need to read all this poetry in old English to be well read. You are a very literary person already. To understand this book, you need to learn old English, and I think it would be a waste of time. You can read summaries to know what the book is about, and move on. The mindset of reading the classics to understand the culture you live in, though, is really amazing. Sorry, I was being rude by talking to someone in public who is doing their thing. I just never saw anyone actually read The Faerie Queene outside of school settings and really wanted to say hi.
As she is giving me back my copy of the book, I noticed she is wearing a ring, so I didn't ask her to go sit down and chat. But I could tell she was very excited to meet someone, out in the wild, who had passion for same things as she did. We did make intense eye contact and I could tell that, in that moment, anything was possible. But we simply exchanged a warm handshake and parted our ways, melting back into the crowd we had appeared from.
It did leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling that people like me are out there, just quietly reading their favourite fatties, in cozy cafes, indie movie theatres, or on park benches.
#entertainment
source
Not sure if this is allowed in this sub, but it was a magical moment, please allow me to share.
I (a mid-30s guy) went to a local indie movie theatre on Friday evening to watch Wong Kar Wai's "In the Mood for Love". I sit down, pull out the book that I am currently reading now - The Faerie Queene - and started going through it. I can understand enough of it to get what's going on in the plot and guesstimate what they are trying to convey, but need assistance (chatgpt) to understand the deeper meaning.
This hobby - non-major movies and books - is a hobby that only I seem to enjoy out of my circle of friends, and it can be very lonely at times, to think that I don't have anyone else to talk to about these things.
So I'm sitting there, reading this big ass book I half understand, and I hear tapping noise behind me. I ignore it, but it continues, so I turn around. I see a woman, a bit older than me, and she goes "You are reading the Faerie Queene! I majored in English literature. Are you a student?" I told her that no, I'm just reading it because I want to, and she couldn't believe it, said nobody reads The Faerie Queene just because they want to. I told her that, honestly, I'm struggling a bit, maybe you can help me a little after the movie is done. She laughed and said okay.
After the movie is over, I catch up with her. We are two people on a busy sidewalk, I'm showing her my Goodreads, explaining I grew up in Korea so I read all the Eastern classics and wanted to understand Canadian culture and eventually build up to read the Ulysses by reading all the Western classics. I've been at it for years, starting with Iliad and Odyssey, Aeneid and other Greek/Roman stuff, the entire Bible with annotation, just read The Magic Mountain... and had read Divine Comedy and Morte D'Arthur, and felt ready to tackle The Faerie Queene, but the combination of it being in old English and being poetry made it difficult.
She said something along the lines of:
I know you do this for your own sake, but you don't need to read all this poetry in old English to be well read. You are a very literary person already. To understand this book, you need to learn old English, and I think it would be a waste of time. You can read summaries to know what the book is about, and move on. The mindset of reading the classics to understand the culture you live in, though, is really amazing. Sorry, I was being rude by talking to someone in public who is doing their thing. I just never saw anyone actually read The Faerie Queene outside of school settings and really wanted to say hi.
As she is giving me back my copy of the book, I noticed she is wearing a ring, so I didn't ask her to go sit down and chat. But I could tell she was very excited to meet someone, out in the wild, who had passion for same things as she did. We did make intense eye contact and I could tell that, in that moment, anything was possible. But we simply exchanged a warm handshake and parted our ways, melting back into the crowd we had appeared from.
It did leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling that people like me are out there, just quietly reading their favourite fatties, in cozy cafes, indie movie theatres, or on park benches.
#entertainment
source
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