pseudo-experiences

We're not immortal.  We can't transport ourselves through time.  There's a limit to what we can experience.  I used to think fiction did the trick to help us with that sad reality.  By reading a novel and jumping into the imaginary world, we can experience anything.

But I realized at some point that fiction was fiction.  It can grab our hearts and make us cry but still, when I face the vividness of reality, I think it's almost always better than fiction.  Maybe it's because I haven't read fiction in a long time.  But even when I did, I was pretty lazy.  I never read Dostoevsky or Goethe or Hemingway; I only read works of writers who most likely had read their works.  And because I was not only lazy but also arrogant, I believed that you didn't necessarily have to read Hemingway to get a Hemingway-ish insight.  After all, he's everywhere.  I understood enough about what he had to say by reading other people's works that were easier to read.  Sort of like the food chain: cows eat corn, we eat cows, and the corn as a result becomes part of our body.  Or maybe like having soup with some beef extract instead of beef itself.

Which I now understand are two very different things.  The soup can always be just water without no beef extract whatsoever.  And of course the chewing is what counts if you want to grow your brain muscle.  No matter how many times I come across the transformed version of the world's greatest works, it will never be equal to reading the original work, just like eating cow is different from eating corn.  What's worse, when you're at the top of the food chain, the foods you eat can be densely polluted.  Something that was very thin at the bottom of the pyramid can be condensed at the top.

But after all, I still think it's a very efficient way of getting nutrients.  I am so lazy!

On a side note, there might come a day when 'fiction' could become 'reality' in our minds.  Like I've probably written before, everything happens in our brain.  I hear that there is a research going on that would enable people to experience a 100 year life in a couple of weeks.  So maybe when you're diagnosed with an incurable disease that would kill you in a month, you could experience the rest of your life in your head before you die.  And maybe we could all have a happy ending.  Doesn't sound bad, does it?