Humans have told stories for thousands of years. They started as oral tales trying to make sense of the world, with storytellers memorising thousands of words and hundreds of stories to tell to all those who wanted to hear them. Gilgamesh is often quoted as being the earliest epic poem and is closely followed by Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. These tales and so many others blended mythology and the real world into a history filled with parables and morality questions that still fascinate and inspire us today.
Our words are now less vocal.
Stories have become printed, pressed into paper and digitally saved for generations to come. We have never had more ready access to stories and yet our consumption of them is beginning to dwindle. As Artificial Intelligence and Social Media takeover as time blackholes, literacy rates have started falling around the world and with them the younger generation’s interest in reading. Something that saddens me deeply.
I have spent most of my life surrounded by stories. Reading has always been a comfort to me. A way to experience the world when my own experience becomes limited by my health.
I have travelled though galaxies and time. Through the world’s end and the beginning of new one’s. I’ve read some of the most beautiful romances and some of the most heartbreaking. Learnt about medical breakthroughs and the dangers of of ignoring the past. I’ve seen magic exploding into the world and civilisations, complex and new, rise before falling. If you can think it, I have probably read about it, or there is a book out there ready to show me.
Nothing, and I truly mean nothing, has opened the world up to me more than books.
That is their true power.
Whenever I visit someone’s house, one of the first things I look out for is their bookshelves. I learn a lot about that person from the books they read. The ones they keep and sometimes even the ones they get rid of. I worked for three years in a secondhand bookshop. Donors whole lives and thoughts could be gleaned from the books they were giving away. We had vast collections of aviation literature, unique boxes of pulpy sci-fi, and quite a few varieties of encyclopedias. There’s something beautiful about a pre-loved book. It holds the love and thoughts of an individual for years.
Most of my friends will tell you that we don’t get through many conversations without books being mentioned somewhere within them. And while most of the things I yammer about the current story I’m reading are in no way relevant to them, my friends are absolute angels for letting let me go off on a whole tirade about one character’s decision that impacts the entire novel, or a cliffhanger that I must sit upon until the next installment is published. (Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J. Maas, I’m looking at you here.)
Books have allowed me to feel beyond the anger, frustration, and, sometimes, utter despair, that plagues me when my health is bad.
They have become my escape.
As children, we are encouraged to create our own worlds. Play amongst fairies, magical lands and made up enemies, often placing ourselves as the heroes of those tales. It is us who slays the dragon, saves the people, and helps good to triumph over evil.
But as we grow up, those tales become forgotten.
We slot into other peoples stories, no longer seeing ourselves for the heroes that we are. We lose the ability to imagine another world for ourselves as the weight of ‘reality’ bears over us. We lose the spark that dares to let us dream.
There are moments, where I feel burdened down by a build up of anger, anxiety and depression so great that I want to scream. Often, when I struggle to find a foreseeable path through, I have turned to books and stories to help me make sense of my current predicament, or to calm the intense emotions that prevent me from looking at a situation in a sensible way.
I read about characters who face almost impossible odds and yet, almost always, find a way through. Yes, they may be battered and bruised. And yes, not everything they love often survives along the way. But they still keep fighting, emerging stronger than at the beginning of their tale.
As J.R.R. Tolkien once said:
“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
The world is difficult and, at times, plain scary.
We are forced to face difficult truths and have to battle our way through them. But if we can lighten the load just a little with a good story and a great escape then I think that that is time well spent.
From just A Simple Writer.
