My Uncle has been talking about Neil Gaiman for quite some time.
He kept telling me to read Coraline. Sure. I made a mental note of
it, but quite honestly, it sounded a bit freaky.
"Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug
to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the
need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you
have to know how it's all going to end … that's a very real drive. And it
forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To
discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're on the
road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly,
a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world,
in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant,
but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we
navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to
follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot
understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and
translation programs only go so far.
* * *
And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy.
When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other
people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful
of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a
world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things,
visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone
else out there is a me, as well. You're being someone else, and when you return
to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed."
Gaiman's thoughts about stories and storytelling itself all feel so right. When talking about his sensational and haunting Ocean at the End of the Lane (my favorite book I've read this year), Gaiman explained "The Ocean that was the size of a pond but contained everything in the universe . . . a metaphor for story itself; the magic of a book, of a story, is that its only this many pages, but . . . there is a world in there . . . and you can fit it all in . . . the same way you can fit an Ocean into a bucket 'if you ask it nicely'."
And then today, I
happened upon the below quote from his book, American Gods, another of Gaiman book's that I have not yet read. And this quote, it's most definitely the best thing I've read today.
In fact its the best thing I've read in quite some time:
“I can believe things that are true and things that
aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.
I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and
the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that
people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by
secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones
that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our
water and our women.
I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the
future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come
back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys
with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is
coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.
I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks
and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that
California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida
is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.
I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our
resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the
common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.
I believe that the greatest poets of the last century
were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that
thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.
I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I
believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's
aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a
particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the
same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually
just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe
billions of years older than the universe itself.
I believe in a personal god who cares about me and
worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set
the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even
know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal
chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.
I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just
hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on
will lie about the little things too.
I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social
lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that
while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if
you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would
ever trust the legal system.
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel
joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as
well lie back and enjoy it.”
More recently, I discovered his well known poem/graphic novel "Instructions," a set of instructions for surviving a fairy tale adventure, and also for life. Read it. It's mind-blowing.
Alright alright. I'll read Coraline.
