In praise of reading and fiction
Let us defend the liberal democracy that, with all its limitations, continues to signify political pluralism, coexistence, tolerance, human rights, respect for criticism, legality, free elections, alternation in power, everything that has been taking us out of a savage life and bringing us closer – though we will never attain it – to the beautiful, perfect life literature devises, the one we can deserve only by inventing, writing, and reading it.
Mario Vargas Llosa
The point here is not to reiterate how I for the first time guessed the correct Nobel Prize winner (which I did :) but to consider for a moment the importance and influence of language and fiction.
Reading Mario Vargas Llosa's adress to the Nobel gathering I can't help but thinking about the importance of language in my own life. And the huge impact that fiction has had on my personal development.
Llosa describes learning to read as "the most important thing that has happened to him" because it changed his life into dreams and his dreams into life. And this is exactly the point. This is the thing with language, with the written word that makes it into magic. It blurs the borders between reality and surreality and makes everything possible.
Similar praises of the qualities of literature have been expressed by Helene Cixous and Jeanette Winterson. Cixous writes "I don't write to keep. I write to touch the body of the instant with the tip of the words." Because the conglomerate of words transcends their separate meaning and becomes something otherwordly. And this is why metaphors are not to be trifled with, cause as Kundera said; a single metaphor can give birth to love. Because once language is created, it can't be held accountable for what it causes. Or, in the words of Albert Camus:
Truth, like light, blinds.
Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight
that enhances every object.
And although I am not a famous writer, I think I can say without the hint of a doubt,
that I, too, would be nothing without the art of language and literature.
