I didn't watch movies today. Instead of it, I've read a book. "Miracles Of Life" by J.G.Ballard, an English Science Fiction writer's autobiography. I still can't see how Ballard's books are. I have to be embarrassed because I have never read his popular book "The Crystal World". But I think that he wrote his novels which are trying to describe modern people's weird minds by the books I've read. Not the society or material (computers or smartphones etc...) which is outside of ourselves, but the personal mind (the things in our heads) which is broken. That might be his famous words "the inner space".
In "Miracles Of Life", Ballard writes about his childhood in Shanghai and the second life in England he moved to. It might not have exciting events but he describes how he had a rich mind at the life of movement and also does how he had experienced the changing. He doesn't write the outside drama but the inner side of him which caught the changing of the environment. How the outside affected the inside... that kind of consciousness made him being a vivid writer.
Then, I read "The Complete J.G.Ballard's Short Stories Volume 2" a halfway listening to Suede (an English rock band which I had listened to when I was in my youth). Sometimes Ballard's stories describe certain ruining and decadence. But then, why he doesn't write the end of the world itself? He writes the ruining (the process of the ending). I think that is because he might believe the possibility human being has. "Death might be the fatal end but the human's imagination and will can come over the vanish of itself" (I heard he writes like that... I read this quote as translated words in Japanese). I can't forget the attitude which tries to hand the hope to children.
I learned the name of Ballard when I read Ryu Murakami's essay during my high school time. I had read "War Fever" and was interested in the short novels which took the forms of lists in the dictionary or interviews. After that, I tried to read his novels certainly. But I still don't know who he is. So I thought I should read the essay "A User's Guide to the Millennium". Of course, I also want to read "The Crystal World". By the way, Oh my gosh, what books will I read the next time?
