Haroun and the Sea of Stories was an epic way to start off a semester. I am a slow reader, so when I had finished it, it had taken me but the whole day. However, I did not mind. After some time reading, I discovered a rumbly in the tumbly, as Whinny-the-Pooh would boldly declare, and was quickly back to the book, snuggled in my bed, unaware that the whole day had passed. And then it dawned on me: if there were no other reasons for stories that aren't true, wouldn't it be so that a story is good for revitalizing the soul and rejuvinating the everyday hardworker before he jumps back into the stress of the real world?? Of course, I believe that stories that aren't true have morals that we are supposed to learn from, yada, yada... but what about the virtue of a good relaxing story, that escape that we all so desperately need every now and again? As I write this, I cannot help but think of Wallace Stevens' poem, The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm. This happens to be one of my favorite poems of all time because of how Stevens elaborately depicts the magic that occurs when a reader opens a book and becomes enveloped with it. Ah, the beautiful bewitchment of a story's pages. And with that I say BAM! to all you neigh-sayers out there... I profess: what is the point of stories that ARE true!?
And for those of you who are curious:
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
