I've realised something. About stories. Stories always seem to have a point. Something to tell us, a moral to learn, a comment on the real world, an analogy.
Right from The Very Hungry Caterpillar, through Bridget Jones' Diary, to War and Peace. But when I was little I never worried about what the stories meant. I read about Anansi and the Spider, the Tortoise and the Hare. I read the Just So stories, and loved every minute. But only because I liked the stories. The morals sunk in by themselves, no-one forced them on me. No-one said, "This story will tell you how to live your life".
Then I got to high school and suddenly everything you read has a message, a symbol, a point. Like Of Mice and Men isn't just a really great read. Did Steinbeck sit down and think 'I must write this scene by the river ever so descriptively, so that it contrasts with George's inability to describe or understand Lenny's disability to the utmost'? No, he didn't; he just wrote the damn book. Because he was a good writer, all the words fell into place, and others have found meaning to attach to it. And then teachers came along and ruined everything by trying to force those messages down our throats, unimaginatively and monotonously. Like we couldn't have just read and enjoyed the story.
Learning makes things complicated. It strips beautiful things of their beauty by making us understand them. The very worst of these, for me, was photosynthesis. I like trees, I love seasons, and watching buds sprout and blossom fall and leaves turn golden. And conkers and nuts and fruit coming and going. I never needed to know why or how these happened. And then school taught me and the magic was gone. The leaves weren't just changing to gold, they were shutting down for the winter to preserve energy in the shorter, darker days of the year. That wasn't a pretty blossom, it was a sex organ designed to attract insects which then whore the trees pollen out to all it's neighbours. Why did I need to know that? Wasn't it enough just to enjoy them being beautiful?
Isn't it enough, when you're an adult, to just enjoy a book, a film, a song, without it having some deep political significance or prophecy or agenda? I miss that time when I was young enough that adults didn't think I needed to know.
I could have watched District 9 and seen for myself the connotations to real life, without a million and one news outlets and online sources gabbling on about it. Without having to THINK about it. Right now I'm re-reading The Book of Lost Things and enjoying the deep and complex parallels it draws to real life. Completely without worrying about how a metaphor here and there creates deeper understanding than a straight description, or where and how syntax and semantics play their role. The subconscious deals with those things. I don't feel like I should inflict it upon my conscious mind too.
So I'm trying to forget the moral. Instead, I want to love the story. To try and return to a time when the story was enough. And all that extra gumph we learn in school was irrelevant. Because really, it still is.
Rubes x
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