IT IS A sorry bookshelf that is filled only with the books you have read. That is no longer a bookshelf, but an archive, only a memory away from standing as dead history. To bring that bookshelf alive, what you need to do is build your atemporal, ever-shifting self into its recesses—the books you once wanted to read, but no longer do, brushing shoulders with the books you insist you will get around to reading, both envying the prestige of those books you half-read, put down and finally became too busy to finish. That is a living bookshelf where all those who love you can see you holistically, like a collage portrait where each spine gestures to the observer the kind of person this reader wanted to be for a short while.

That living diversity of interests is where I want to start this little self-contained, unique perspective on my father, Ooi Kee Beng. The bookshelves of our house reach from Da Vinci’s sketches to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and from Malaysian geopolitics to European poetry, but they also cross universes from the fantasy novels I loved as a tween to the pottery pieces my sister made before leaving for university. Each cover my finger lights upon as I consider picking up something to read (before coming to my senses and redirecting to my phone) is a small insight into one of the million people he—like us all—has bounced between wanting himself to be. A historian, a martial artist, a charcoal sketcher, a calligrapher, a journalist, a biographer, a fiction author, a novelist, a pianist.

I stand before this bookshelf with my father’s bold eyebrows and wild hair, and in turn, the bookshelf stands before me as his faceless painting; I see neither his nose nor his beard, yet it is as though I am in his presence.

I was always struck by what seemed to me—even as I grew old enough to begin unveiling the lie that grown-ups knew what they were doing and talking about—to be a decided wholeness of self in my father. It felt—and feels—as though the voice with which he helped me with my maths homework was not doing anything all that different from the voice which I heard speak at conferences.

With one breath, he speaks to me about making my Masters’ applications and asks the gardener how his kids are doing. The Papa who reacts to my messages with nothing but a (often frustrating and always funny) thumbs up emoji is acting no differently from the man who responds with curiosity to the Char Koay Teow hawker, who has abandoned his wok to come to our table and continue their last conversation about what the best duck eggs are for cooking.

This is the trait he passed on to me without ever saying it—though he has often been vocal about what he hopes I should learn from him—to appreciate what I am going here to call “The Joyous Opportunity for Interest”.

That is the line by which I would define my father; it is how I think of him, and it is the way in which his thinking has journeyed me forward into a world that seems to be beating ever more anxiously between diversity and purity. He taught me in his image to find these remarkable chances to talk meaningfully to new people from worlds you do not occupy, that by treating each human being as a guru of their own life, you become the student of ten thousand masters.

He has told me many times that good luck is not random, but rather, that by opening yourself up to the chance for good luck, and most crucially, by valuing the people whom you meet and spend time with, good luck has no choice but to come your way in time.

It is no different from the way he writes his editorials.

The opportunity arises to be interested in a second-hand copy of Sir Francis Bacon, or he finds joy in the creative stimulation of sitting on a porch in Gopeng, feeding fishes, and like a night orchid blooming over the course of an evening, growing steadily in just the corner of your eye, this interest catches and unites other realisations, questions and observations from other moments of interest, developing both consciously and unconsciously into something which you, kind Penang Monthly reader, may hold in your hands and think, “How did he have the time to do all of this thinking?”

That time was spent over dinner. Or perhaps walking with his wife and kids. Or while watching the latest trashy Jason Statham action movie. Some of the nebulous thought associations which were always floating in his mind and which have been continuously added to over the course of a lifetime of interests coalesced finally into something tangible enough to be written.

I suppose that is one of the tenets I wanted to express. How intensely social, but even more, how pivotally inspired this process is. All too often, we think of calling something “inspired” to mean some almost supernatural, muse-borne miracle, when that is far from the truth. To create something inspired is to allow yourself to be inspired by the world around you and the people in it, to find enough happiness in your capacity for interest that every raindrop in a thunderstorm inspires you.

Each book in his bookshelf is a testament to curiosity and to interest; even forgotten, unread or thought missing, they are saved from dead history by living on as one of those nebulous thought associations. Just as those thought associations are passed on to cultured Penang Monthly readers in the form of editorials, so were they passed on to me in the form of growing up in the warm shade of my father and his bookshelf. That is how meaningful those sparks of inspiration which we all flash upon are, that their echoes resonate through so many minds.

No article worth reading could come from only one mind; creative thinking is the product of being interested, of being curious, of being loving and of taking care not to let the sparks of inspiration we all flash upon go to waste.