A friend asked me the other day “What’s the point of reading fiction? It doesn’t teach you anything concrete, like a self help, or history or biology book.” I launched myself into a full fledged defense of fiction, and as I heard myself talking, I realized just how much a teaching instrument I considered literature to be.
When I graduated from the bowels of the earth, aka Sandford Flemming and the Engineering conditioning, I felt myself awakening from a hazy dream. I had absorbed a ghastly amount of information: programming languages, circuits and their laws, data systems and their intricacies, and a whole truckload of acronyms that I can’t even begin to remember. The wasteful thing about all this was that it had failed to change me as a human being into anything better than I had been before. All it did was give me a headache.
That summer, like one escaped from incarceration, I breathed the fresh air, and picked up a book. It wasn’t on Network Systems, or C++. It was wonderful, liberating fiction! And for the first time in four years I felt myself really learning. Learning about the human soul and the world of ideas. In that one year after the liberation (ha!) I felt that I had learned so much more than in those four years that my fat student loan had just paid for.
So I tried to convince this friend that fiction IS indeed full of things to learn. The best part about it is that it is not spelled out to you and underlined as information in a self help book is. It’s there like a mystery, for you to decipher from the story and from between the lines of a story. It’s like a courtship, with stolen glances and sweet anticipation, rather than a drawn up prenup agreement. It changes your mind like no training manual ever will.
So read on, brave souls! Read on!
Amen sister!
I’ve had this exact same conversation with my roommate. He doesn’t see how reading fiction is a good use of time, how he gains “nothing” from it. I should send him this post.
Well said!