The Real World is Bigger Than the World That Merely Exists
I now know that the place I sensed just outside of my sight was the imagination. I knew it then, but I didn’t have the words for it. Barsoom, the Hyborian Age and Earthsea weren’t places I could drive to, I knew. Still, I had the sense that they were real, by some measure of reality that was different than the way in which my house and my dog were real. There was resonance there. Things in the stories touched on things in life. Conan’s thrill at combat and adventure was as real as the feeling I got running, jumping, and hitting other boys on the football field. When Heinlein’s characters expounded on human society and the value of the individual, it reflected the things I was noticing about life as a geek in high school.
The reality of the stories lived (or, in some cases, died) with that resonance. Stories with that resonance were true, even if they never happened. Characters with that resonance were real, though they’d never lived. They’re phantasms that live by borrowing from the experiences of their readers. It’s not just elegy, though. Good stories aren’t just pushing the buttons of memory. The good stories, the great ones, take that borrowed reality and extend it beyond the immediate resonance and into the things that never happened and never could.via Shadowfirebird
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