What is imagination good for, really? Are there not enough stories of tragedies and of joy in the real life, in news for instance, to satisfy our voyeurism (the basis of our story telling, I am sure that the first story to be told was a gossip!!)?And are there not, after thousands of years of storytelling , enough stories in our common tradition to render all new attempts on retelling, pointless? Why do we need more? How come we still get excited (well I do . . . .) when a new author, describing as promising appears on the world media scene and how come we still have a thing like the Nobel Prize in Literature, no other art form have been celebrated in this way ? Literature is still first page stuff, although one must be excused for thinking that all stories have already been told?
But isn’t literature, and poetry especially, the most intimate of art forms? Isn’t literature a window into the human internal dialogue? Surely story and history (news or gossip if you wish) are two ends of a spectrum. We can live without the gossip (although it would be boring), we can even live without beauty (better not tried . . .) but we cannot live in separation, we cannot live in loneliness, we cannot live in a vacuum. We need to speak and to hear others speak and this is what literature fulfils. With literature we get a unique insight into the mind of a fellow human being, we get a glimpse into someone else’s most intimate self, we literary hear his/her mind.
In a world where we are more and more detached from each other, where we rely more and more on computers and social medias (what a paradox !) to stay in touch, literature becomes more and more important. No other art form has this level of intimacy, film or theatre merely visualises an internal process, but with literature you can hear it, live it, put a face to it, maybe a face from your own world.
I do not read all that much, I haven’t really got the time, but I do have my books that I read a couple of pages from and then maybe a couple of days later I read some more. I like this, it is more of a dialogue like this and you tend to live more with the book. The book I have on the go now is Llosas “Conversation in the Cathedral” which I highly, highly recommend. And it is such a book, and such a writer that he really overwhelms you with his world and characters. You start to remember scenes from the book and they feel like your own memories, characters start to speak freely in your mind and you rely on them like real people. Wonderful, but I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to read the book, in one go. It would take over your world completely, become your own like a day dream and, unfortunately, we all need to function in a reality and not in the intimate dreams of our inner mind. But thanks to books, thanks to the wealth of literature and the glorious spectrum of different writers, we all can, quite without getting raised eye brows, slip into our own inner world and dream about a different life, even if it is just for a minute . . . .
