A heartbreaking story in the past

I admit with a heavy heart that this article is a cliché about National Children's Day a few years ago. However, there is something different this year with the presence of the monumental event of Literature Entering the Curriculum. Regardless of the tangled tangles behind the event which until today is still a topic of conversation here and there, even though only in passing, this inevitably makes me remember an experience no less than three decades ago.

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The late 1980s were certainly a time that seemed to be on the other side of the coin we are standing on today. Days that seemed to go by more slowly did not then make anyone in them focus on doing the art of doing nothing, but rather absorbing as much as they could in silence, alone, and lonely. It was during this time that I became acquainted with literary readings other than the books Kumpulan Dongeng Sedunia and Burung Emas and Cerita-Stories Lainnya which at that time of course I did not recognize as literature, through Intisari which my father bought once a month, I started reading crime stories some of which were labeled based on real events without me even proving their truth. Again, this valuable experience was certainly not something I could name at that time and just became an automatic monthly activity.

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In the last dozen years, along with the increasingly rapid pace of the days, in let's say the evaluation of what happened in childhood, what happened to my child was an event of absorbing information without suspicion. There were also no such worries from my parents when they saw me exposed to such adult readings instead of children's books with innocent narratives and illustrations. In fact, everything that could have felt vulgar in a number of these crime stories did not immediately make me as a child feel a sensation that was annoying, deafening, or disgusting, and all of that was because of language. In its strict realism, the stories come with a language that can be said to be foreign, not everyday, although not necessarily flowery, so that it automatically becomes a filter that distances me from the shock of the tragic and dark events it conveys.

From this, although of course I have no right to compare that era with everything that is contemporary because every era has its own soul, seeing many children today whose free time is filled with the hustle and bustle of audiovisual gadgets is certainly not a beautiful sight for me. In fact, whether they realize it or not, the mood of some of them is also more or less determined by gadgets. These children seem to feel increasingly less boring moments or even completely stagnant because there is always a gadget in their grasp. This reality is what may have contributed to their reluctance to link hands with books that tend to demand physical stagnation and surrender to loneliness.

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On the other hand, access to reading material in the last decade has improved because although it still has its own limitations, a number of community reading parks are present in a number of locations, as well as mobile libraries initiated by both government institutions and literacy communities. Not to mention online sites that provide the widest possible access to short reading materials such as short stories and poetry, both those they compile from the mass media and those they curate themselves periodically. This means that even though the price of physical books is still relatively expensive, the lack of reading material is certainly no longer an excuse for rarely or even not reading literature.

Many have written about the benefits of reading literature, starting from those related to values, expanding the horizon of knowledge, to experiencing life through "other eyes". That is why I do not want to direct this writing there, but rather to another path that does not mean it becomes less meaningful: reading (literature) is practicing solitude. This is again inseparable from me, a child who experienced being in the waiting room of a general practitioner and dentist where there was always a newspaper or magazine on the main table, although not infrequently some were published months earlier. In a few dozen to tens of minutes in that public space, anyone who reads can be said to be making themselves solitude. There is an event of pausing oneself from the social universe and the hustle and bustle, then taking a trip to the reading universe spread out by those old newspapers and magazines. Such an event is certainly more intense when what is read is literature because reading a verse of poetry is the act of following word by word which often does not obey the principles, even suddenly playing circus. Likewise, reading fiction, whether short stories or novels, no matter how realistic, is still not present as it is, and according to Wolfgang Iser (1980) provides "empty spaces" to be "filled, interpreted" by the reader. In fact, fantasy fiction is actually a large tree that hatches and grows from a seed of reality that is looking in the mirror.

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In one page that may be eternal, literature reminds us to "chew slowly": mark the most impressive or most problematic parts, return to the previous page if there is something that is not understood, open a dictionary when blocked by archaic words or from other linguistic traditions, and restrain ourselves from opening the last page to find out the fate of the idolized character even though we still have full power to do so. Reading literature is a continuous internal dialectic during the process while practicing enduring with ourselves. This becomes even more crucial for today's generation who live in a communal society – real and virtual – with the desire and freedom to speak out loud and almost talkatively, so as not to easily dissolve, disguise themselves, then become this or that without first having a long conversation with themselves.