What is man?

As this is my first blog in a while, and the first for this particular class, I thought that I would begin things rather broadly, start at the surface of the ocean before I dove down into its murky depths of the sea of stories. My first blog then, will not discuss any stories or novels that we will read later but only attempt to in some way capture my own thoughts of the first class and capture, in writing, some of the thoughts that are swimming around in my head.

In class today, we asked what I think is a very important question: "What is the use of stories that aren't even true?" The words ooze into my brain, filling every crack, every crevice. I have lived my entire life being asked that very question by parents and grandparents, friends and relatives, advisers and mentors each wondering the true importance of "reading for a living." Eventually, the question gets asked so much, the words become you're own, and you begin to doubt your own understanding of why you do what you do. You look into the mirror of your soul and wonder if the world knows better than you do, if perhaps science and math are the answers while those men and women who bury themselves in literature are blinding themselves to a world that is quickly changing around them, metamorphosing into a place of calculation and observation.

Yet what scientists and mathematicians do not seem to comprehend is that the first stories, the myths and legends passed down from one generation to the next, are the attempts of men to understand the world around them. Imagine a man sitting by the soft glow of a fire and looking around him. He sees plants and trees, rocks and animals. He sees the fire itself and he gazes above him into the endless expanse of space and wonders where it all came from. Without the tools of science, he shapes a world where gods sleep and in that sleep the universe is created. Or perhaps he imagines that the Earth is itself a deity and the Sky her lover, and from their union were born gods that ruled over every aspect of creation. We scoff now at the ignorance of such a man, call him foolish and unlearned, yet, in his eyes, those stories, and the realities that they created, were as real as the grass beneath his feet.

Some will say that is all fine. Let the man of the past have his illusion of reality. We now know the truth and as such can put silly notions of the divine behind us. We can instead look to experiments that will show us how the world works and operates. But to define a story as the beliefs of an ignorant people is to cut out much of what it means to be a story.

The most obvious addition to the meaning of stories is the fact that they allow us to escape our own world. Stories can transport us to mystical castles or seedy dungeons. Through stories we can become powerful wizards or witches, crafty crooks that always get away, or poor orphans that eventually find homes and love. Stories can light the candle of hope in the bleakest of moments or plunge us into sorrow on the sunniest of days. Stories are the stepping stones into realities where our greatest dreams and our darkest nightmares meet.

But they also serve another purpose. Stories are not only our past, they are our present and future. Stories help define who we were, who we are, and what we will become. They are the driving force of our identity. Each thread of the vast tapestry, woven through our own existence, redefines our view of the world, adds a new lens to the scope through which we view our own surroundings.

Perhaps the answer to "What is the use of stories that aren't even true?" comes as an alternate perspective to that of science and mathematics. While they look to the world around them and try to figure out its intricacies, to delve into its mysteries, readers of stories look within, turning the soul of man inside out much like a biologist might dissect a frog. But it is not possible to see the soul as one could the internal workings of a frog, and so the reader does only that which is available to them. They take the mind, transcribed onto the page, and break it apart, word by word, sentence by sentence. They do not ask what shapes the world, but rather what shapes man and inspires him to look at the world in such a way.

The use of stories that aren't even true, then, is their ability to illuminate. Too often we as humans are so fascinated with the world that we forget ourselves. What made us wonder at the cosmos in the first place? What drove us to look for other life in the universe or create it within our own minds? It is through the window of literature that we can begin to answer these questions and start to understand ourselves as much as we wish to understand our surroundings.