The Age of Innocence

When I was a young lass, I used to run into and/or trip over many stationary objects. This was not because of my inherent clutziness (though that has caused a tumble or two), but because I used to bring books to school and could not be bothered to put them down in order to walk. As a youngling, I would travel around the treacherous and volatile playgrounds of Valley View Elementary school with my head in a book simply because I was so immersed in whatever fantastical world of words I was visiting that day. As I grew older, my reading methods evolved. I developed a tactic I like to call "stealth reading", and below I have included a guide for the everyday reader on how to master such a practice.


How To Stealth Read:
A Guide To Reading When You're Not Supposed To Be
Perhaps you're in class. You're bored, you're tired, and all you want to do is read the book you've stashed in your bag, but the pesky teacher is making you study out of a horribly old and awfully smelling text book. What's a bookworm to do? It is time, my friends, to put into practice the art of stealth reading.


Step 1. Grab whatever terribly large textbook you are supposed to be learning things out of and prop it up in your lap.


Step 2. Sneakily take out whatever wonderfully interesting book you've been dying to read all day and prop it up in your lap behind said terribly large textbook. The key is to hide the book you truly want to read behind the utterly dull textbook the American School System wants to educate you with. (Warning: this does not work with books larger than the textbook. Do not try. You will fail miserably).


Step 3. Proceed to read your book in class, safe from the pestering of the teacher because it looks as if you are reading their textbook and being a good little student. Besides, who the hell would be crazy enough about reading to bring their own book to class anyways?


Dangers of Stealth Reading:
1. If you are caught, you will be teased mercilessly for the remainder of the school year.
2. Teachers may catch you and take the book from you.
3. Other classmates may see you doing this and throw things at you, effectively distracting you from your reading.


Practice With Caution


My point in all of this is that when I was younger, the world of books totally engaged me. I was inseparable from whatever novel of the day I decided to attach myself to. Reading was an experience of pure pleasure, unmatched by any other. But as I grew older, I slowly and painfully learned the stylistic techniques authors use to give a story meaning, and reading became something different, more of an exercise of brain power than an enjoyable plunge into another world. The curtain was pulled back, and i could see the intricacies and inter workings of stories I once read simply for the love of a good, strapping yarn. No longer could I find that magical reading trance, once so easily accessed, that pulled me to another universe for hours, even days at time. The amount of books I read per month dropped from 8 to 1. For a while there, my enjoyment of stories was lost. Don’t get me wrong, I still took considerable pleasure in reading the expertly crafted novels that we were pointed to in school, but the day long treks through my childhood lands of magic were gone for a while. Such as Rashid in Haroun and the Sea of Stories believed he had lost his storytelling abilities, I believed I had lost my gift of effortless enjoyment in reading. And I was right in a sense. Once a person's innocence (or ignorance) has been compromised, it is almost impossible to regain. The salvation of my true love of books came in the form of a much condemned and snubbed genre of literature: science fiction. I had just finished laboriously reading through Philip Roth's The Human Stain, and while Roth is, in my opinion, one of the greatest living American authors, his novels aren't always summer reading material. It was then I stumbled across a book named Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge, who, I believe, is a 4 time Hugo Award Winner. Around 20 pages in, something magical happened. The long lost reading trance began to slowly take hold once again. I would look down at the book, look up, and realize 4 hours had passed. I would read until my eyes were crusty with sleepiness, reluctantly put down the book and go to bed, knowing that the sooner I fell asleep the sooner I could wake up and continue reading again. In sense, I was back. What had caused the long hibernating trance to rear it's magical head once more I wondered? The answer was the utter believability of Vinge's future world. Imagination sparkled from every page of the novel, and 18 year old Nicole was once again enthralled by another world of words. When one is little, it is easy to believe in the worlds a person travels to within the pages of a novel. As one gets older though, these worlds develop holes, become shadowy, and eventually lose their pull. We surrender our imagination in order to grow up, and thus it becomes more and more difficult to imagine these words are real. As adults, we need help with our imaginings. Therefore, it took an author of unfathomable creative genius in Vinge to imagine for adult Nicole what youngling Nicole once knew effortlessly. With the bliss of innocence lost, it takes the superior imagination of another to bring it back. 




P.S. I realize I was supposed to begin this blog with a quote from Frye, but I must request an extension on this instruction in order to find one that fully does him justice.

Very Big Fish

What the use of stories that aren't true? A question repeatedly asked of me by my aunt, who, upon hearing  I had decided to declare my major English Lit, immediately went straight to the liquor cabinet and poured herself 3 shots of tequila. I suppose this is a decently respectable question, but the answer to this lies all around us. What is the point of movies about fantastical realms, unable to exist in the real world, but actualized through the light and magic of modern day cinema? What is the use of allegorical tales about hobbits and wizards, set in a middle earth created solely from imagination, yet utterly believable? We are surrounded by webs of fiction, spun by authors of inspiring genius as well as writers of published clumsiness. The use of these stories stems from the truth found within them, no matter how unbelievably fantastic the tale might appear.
Upon immersing myself in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, what immediately struck me was the connecting threads between Rushdie's book and the 2003 Tim Burton film, Big Fish. Burton's movie tells the story of a father and son, separated by the father's love of storytelling. The son's frustration with his father stems from his attempts to learn anything about his father's childhood. When prodded for information, his father responds to his son's questions about his past with fantastical tales the son refuses to believe. At the heart of the movie lies the same question voiced in the opening paragraph of this blog; what's the use of these stories that aren't true? The son grapples with this question throughout the film, wondering how he can truly understand his father if everything the man tells him is merely a story. The film concludes with the father dying, and at his funeral, all the bizarre characters from the stories he told his son make an appearance. Ultimately, the son realizes that his father's tales, while exaggerated, were grounded in reality and thus offer insight into his life. The deepest reality of our lives may not, in fact, be our true selves. Instead, we are the stories we choose to embody, and it is through our stories that we may effectively live forever. Through our stories, we may all become very big fish, swimming in the ocean of notions.