Novels aren't real! Are they a waste of time? Let's hold ourselves to things that are improving, like good Victorians of the last century or the one before or good Puritans from before that. Let's stop buying novels for the public library since we are using taxpayer funds for dreamy stuff that isn't true, just fantasies.
One of my frequently read blogs is "The Annoyed Librarian". In her blog (and it is a 'her') and other places, I sometimes come across the idea that fiction is childish, it is not real and public libraries should not waste time and taxpayer funds buying it.
Such a position more or less implies that books on carpentry and electricity deal with "real" things. But in truth, my ideas of you and of me and of the world are fictions. Scientists and researchers, including those investigating juries and eye witnesses, are finding overwhelming evidence that our minds do not take pictures like a camera and then store the result as in a filing cabinet. What my own mother looked like, the woman into whose face I looked very often and for extended time, is not deeply engraved in my mind. I can recognize Mom's picture as being her when I see one but without the prompt, I only have a rough memory of her face.
Not only do we not have a perfect picture of something or someone we really knew and looked at and spent time with. It turns out that each time, we recall a memory, we change what is stored a little. It seems that we literally cannot recall a memory and keep it without distorting it a bit. I don't know if you have had the Gigi phenomenon happen to you but I have. I recall that my first date with my wife was on a Friday but it was a Saturday. I recall that it was a cloudy day but it was sunny. She recalls that I couldn't keep my hands to myself but that is not what I remember.
We deal with fictions all the time. Quite often, they serve us well. It does help if we can avoid getting too picky about their correspondence to reality.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
