How audiobook can change my mood

I thought audiobook never worked, at least for me.
It demands relentless attention. Only if my mind wanders off for a second, the flow or the plot is lost.
The same can be said for reading, but you can easily pick up from where you left off.
It's not so much a nuisance to move your eye balls than your finger to reverse your iPhone.
And after all, I guess a native English speaker would find it difficult to grasp every single spoken word, let alone a Chinese like me.

I tried anyway, for the first time in my life, an audiobook of Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, narrated by Samuel West.
No doubt it's as good as a book can be. It has all the usual elegance and wits of de Botton.
Lapses of attention did occur as expected, and when it happened, the narrating retreated to become almost like a background music.
That doesn't matter. And that's probably why I found it rather delightful.
To West's credit, by his lively narration, the continuous stream of tuneful British accent and the mere impression of absorbing knowledge and being so intellectual,
my mood was changed, before my life.

Sky covered with quilted blanket

I saw this the other day. The sky was covered with a quilted blanket.
It's closer and more overwhelming than it looks in the picture. ( iPhone camera has a wider angle lens than our human eyes.)
It's something between unreal and surreal. It gave me a strange sensation that could be what philosophers called the moment of sublime?

I don't know how to say. I paint.

You can't miss this sight, if you go from Sogo to Time Square. On the street of transit between two busiest spots in Causeway Bay. There used to be the famous Japanese department store Mitsukoshi of the '80s and '90s. Then it was torn down and gone with time.

A badly designed hoarding was erected, with mindless assembled stock photo faces looking up in anticipation of yet another shopping arcade. "Feel it", "Sense it", "Live it", it says, as empty as the space that has prolonged its presence.

The construction should have been completed by now. But the first concrete is yet to be seen. Among the hustle and bustle of shoppers, it became an existence of its own. And our existence is never in question, never mind others', as long as the shops are open. Except one morning in 2007, a 60-meter crane fell, killed two and injured five. A ripple soon faded into normality.

I pass the site twice everyday, to and off work. I don't know when it started haunting me. Was it the loveliness of the little window opened to let the tree be? The vast yellowness of the vinyl covering and how the flood light made radiance of folds on it? Or simply, I looked up and saw a kitten also looking up, among other printed faces. It was the time my cat was dying.

There's sadness, seems also hope. There's demolition, but also construction. It's night but there's light. A trace of nature surviving in the tides of culture. A person's remembrance of the dead trying to go beyond the hoarding – the veil.

Then words stopped. Language failed. To speak the unspeakable.