ZapTown

Hope you’ve all had a peaceful holiday season, and there was at least one good book under the tree!  One of the reasons why I’ve tried to champion reading fiction over the past year is that, when it’s well-written, fiction can be incredibly powerful. Powerful enough to change the way we look at the world around us, for better or worse. Let me give an example that shows I mean this quite literally: A while back, I was kind of curious about the people I knew and who their heroes were, who they looked up to, so to speak. So I took an informal, not-very-organized poll, and spent a few days offhandedly asking people I knew who their favorite fictional character was, curious to see what they’d say. I received a couple of answers that felt typical, at that time—‘Neo’, ‘Hercules’ and a couple of characters I hadn’t heard of before. However, for me, the most surprising answer was the person, a sometime friend (more of an acquaintance, really) who answered ‘Julius Caesar’.

Julius Caesar.

(This was my actual reaction at the time, too. An awkward silence, followed by me repeating what he’d just said, to make sure we were on the same page, which led to him being confused as to why I was confused, leading to me hastily pointed out, that, hang on, Julius Caesar wasn’t a fictional character, he was a historic one, he’d been a real Roman general and changed the world and everything, and choosing real people was cheating, maaaan….) The end result of all of this was  my buddy staring at me like I’d just grown antlers and telling me that he had no idea what I was talking about, everybody knew that Julius Caesar had been made up by Shakespeare.

Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s greatest creation. It’s an exchange that really did happen, honest. (I wouldn’t have believed it myself, if it didn’t). If only Wikipedia had existed at the time. As it was, I didn’t think to point out that Shakespeare had written several of his most popular plays about real monarchs, and that Richard III, Henry V, et al, weren’t fictional characters either, but still—thinking of that power, of Shakespeare’s ability to take a real situation, a real individual, and write about him with such authority that down through the decades and the centuries, in the minds of certain individuals, his portrait of Shakespeare would literally replace the real record. The sort-of-friend who gave me the answer was an intelligent individual, fairly well-read. He legitimately thought that Julius Caesar was a fictional character. And so, Fiction can change the way we look at the world around us. In a negative sense, it can lull us into believing things that aren’t true, or confusing misinformation with reality. With assuming that someone who really existed never did, was just made up by an exceptionally-gifted playwright. But in its positive side, it can give us ideas that we never might have stumbled across otherwise, nurture our own creativity and give us hope and understanding of the common experiences that we all share as human beings.

The last decade has been a rough time for many people—after the heralding of the ‘end of history’, new problems erupted, and many people find themselves as bad or worse off than they were ten years ago. If there has been progress, many people feel it has left them behind. Now, more than ever, we need good stories. And hope. That’s one reason why I keep reading, and am looking forward to another decade full of good books. Here’s hoping the upcoming New Year treats you kindly. Thanks for being there.