The Fact About Fiction

I prefer reading fiction. Facts bore me to death. Why choose the finite when you can choose to play with fantasies?

Fiction captures me with its sheer power of limitlessness. I can choose to be a Belgian sleuth investigating a murder one day, and a beautiful heroine jilted in love the next. Being me can get dreary sometimes. To live a whole new life in a brand new character and make a fresh new story can be nothing short of fascinating.

And yet, as aloof from reality fiction may seem, I sense a queer affinity between the two. In some strange way, our own natures are touched by these strange fantastic characters that we live through our imaginations. After all, aren't we living these lives in our mind? In our mind we have traveled to these eras and felt what these characters feel, except that our bodies still exist in the present. But an experience of the mind is an experience nevertheless.

Some years back I had read a story about this girl who needs to cross across a haunted bridge, all by herself, in the middle of the night, to reach her house at the other end. I do not remember now who wrote that story. But I distinctly remember the fear I felt when I read it, and how I lived every moment of that fear in my mind, while the girl crossed that bridge (in the story). As it happens, she successfully makes it across the bridge (so it wasn't haunted after all), only to get home to find her house haunted (eeks!). Now where would we be able to live anything like this in real life?

The good thing about fiction is that it stays fictional, so you don't have to face the consequences (you don't actually die when you enter your haunted house after all, even though the character does :)). When you finally put your book down, you are happy to be real. It helps appreciate the real world. 

Wilde has this to say about fiction “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.” Now this is too good to pass!