Jargogled Impressions.

Ever wondered why this habit of writing journals came into being? What drove our ancestors towards documenting their daily lives, thoughts, and feelings in a diary that could potentially be dangerous for them? Why is it that people continue to appreciate a good writing, a clear and concise expression of ideas or of feelings, an eccentric and relatable style despite the constant attention grabbing maneuvers of other forms of media like video, music, etc.? Why do people still like to cuddle up with a good fiction book and spend their day poring over the details of a world that is merely the figment of the author’s imagination? There’s something about transporting yourself from the struggles of your daily life to this mythical, imaginary, and yet relatable world where there’s another protagonist who’s story you want to pursue and see to its logical end.

Stories have always been the primary means of human communication. Despite the onslaught of multiple competing modes of communication (including emojis, machine completed sentences, and gifs), stories are what makes us human. Stories are essentially the engine of empathy with which we are able to relate to the people around us and share in their joys, partake in their laughter, imbibe their sorrows, and learn from their failures.

What makes stories distinctly human? Why are we drawn towards them? From the hieroglyphs in the caves of the earliest of humans to the dense 1000 page novels to the multi-series manga comics to the haikus, there has never been a time when the idea or the power of stories have decreased.

And yet, what purpose do these stories or work of art serve in what we call the real world? These books, articles, poems, or blogposts have never served the hungry with food, stopped a war, helped diagnose a fatal disease.

I have always held the belief that reading gives man a sense of direction and that an appreciation of art makes us better humans. More moral, empathetic, just, sensitive, and understanding. But I don’t have the numbers to support it. For in the practical world, is it not the hard numbers that justify the purpose of something? Art may well have helped few but there are equally prominent cases of people misusing art for their own trenchant, evil purposes. Hitler, most famously, started his life as an artist. And we have multiple examples of dictators, tyrants, corruption ridden individuals, etc. with a keen appreciation of art leading a life that has gone astray despite the seemingly calming effect of art.

So the idea that art or fiction helps make us better humans does not hold ground, at least in a statistical sense. In other words, art is useless when compared to other more worldly professions like doctor, engineer, computer scientist, or plumbers.

But should we strive for usefulness in everything we do? Is uselessness such a bad thing really? I read fiction for the pure pleasure of reading it and find it hard to justify it to the people around me. Increasingly i have found people around me consider fiction to be useless and a waste of time because it does not equip them with something tangible and practical for them to lead their lives. Compare fiction with non fiction, self-help books, popular science, etc. and you would be hard pressed to justify why reading fiction is helpful in modern times.

Fiction relies on language as its medium of expression. And language is an intrinsically human endeavor because we share this language with the people around us. I often find myself appreciating the unique power of language in our day to day lives as we interact and communicate with fellow human beings in a recognizable and relatable language.

Our childhood was an age where we really loved stories. How many of us have fond memories of asking our mother or father to sit down with us at the end of the day to tell us stories of magical creatures in far away lands? What was it about these stories that made us cherish them so much? I think we were trying to find our own fears, desires, inner turmoil within these stories when we were young and found the relative comfort of hearing them from our folks a really uplifting and educating experience. As we grow older, these needs don’t go away. But the pressures of modern day life with the uniquely human institutions of work and jobs make us doubt the significance of these stories in our lives. We become more sophisticated and stingy with our time and anything that does not directly change what we do or desire does not figure prominently in our plans, such as reading fiction.

I see my friends migrating away from fiction books and it gives me a pause really. Are we really in the twilight of the age of the novel? Would the smaller forms of media like blogs, tweets, Tik Tok videos, etc. eventually subsume the novel?

I don’t yet think so. I am still optimistic about our innate desire to relate to the world around us in something more than a scientific, rational, and algorithmic process centric view. The popular science books today have a tendency to treat humans as machines with discernible nerves and buttons that make us feel what we feel, think what we think, react how we react. I have a feeling that we are sowing the seeds of our own extinction. And novel may be a way to relieve ourselves of that tendency.

(Inspired by the Essay Talking to Strangers by Paul Auster)