Read Soft in the Head for Free Online

you realize that you’re going to have to leave all this behind, and probably in a way that won’t be fun. You realize that time doesn’t just pass, every day pushes you one step closer to kicking the bucket. There’s no high score that gives you a free game. You do your circuit, and that’s it, you’re history.
    Honestly, for some people, life is a complete con job.

 
     
    M ARGUERITTE SAYS that cultivating your mind is like climbing a mountain. I understand that better now. When you’re down in the valley, you think you see everything and know everything about the world: the meadows, the grass, the cow dung (that last example is mine). One fine day, you pick up your backpack and start walking. What you leave behind gets smaller the farther you travel: the cows shrink to the size of rabbits, to ants, to flyspecks. Meanwhile the landscape you discover as you climb seems bigger and bigger. You thought the world ended with the mountain, but it doesn’t! Behind it, there is another mountain, and another a little higher, and still another. And then a whole range. The valley where you were living a peaceful life was just one valley among many, and not even the biggest. Actually, it was the arsehole of the universe. As you walk, you meet other people, but the closer you come to the summit, the fewer are still climbing alongside you and the more you freeze your balls off! That’s just another figure of speech. Once you’re at the top, you’re happy, you think you’re clever because you’ve climbed higher than everyone else. You can see for miles. The only thing is, after a while, you realize something really stupid: you’re all alone. All alone and insignificant.
    From the Good Lord’s point of view, even we are probably no bigger than bloody flyspecks.
    This is probably what Margueritte means when she says, Do you know, Germain, culture can be very isolating?
    I think she’s right, and what’s worse, you must feel very dizzy constantly looking down at the world below.
    My plan is to stop halfway up the slope, and I’ll be happy if I manage to climb that high. Margueritte has got education. And I’m not talking about the piss-poor education and a piece of paper that everyone’s got (well, everyone except me), but the sort of higher-level education that takes so many years that you’re old by the time you graduate and don’t have time to make enough pension contributions to be able to retire.  
    Margueritte passed her doctorate, only she wasn’t a real doctor, she worked with plants. She researched grape seeds. Personally, I can’t really see what there is to research, I mean a seed is a seed, there’s not much to it. But that’s what she studied, so I shouldn’t look down my nose at it.
    There are no stupid professions, only bad seeds.
    Anyway, maybe that’s why she’s always talking about cultivating and cultivation. Another pair of words that sound the same but mean different things.
    In cultivation, you till the ground, you mark out your furrows, you aerate the soil where you sow your seeds. And then there’s the cultivating Margueritte talks about where you just pick up a book and read. But that’s not easy either, quite the opposite.
    I can talk about books now: I’ve read some.
    When you’re functionally illiterate like me, you wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to read. You look at the first word,OK, you understand it, then the next, and with a bit of luck the next. You keep going, running your finger under the words, eight, nine, ten, twelve, until you get to a full stop. But when you get there, you’re not better off! Because no matter how much you try to put everything together, you can’t, the words are still jumbled up like a handful of nuts and bolts tossed into a box. For people who know what they’re doing, it’s easy. They just screw the right bits together. They’re not fazed by fifteen words, twenty words, that’s what they call a sentence. For me, for a long time, it