The very idea of writing is a strange one. It never ceases to amaze me that humans can look at little squiggles, dots, and lines, and translate them into words. More than that, it’s interesting how quickly a person learns to read, and even the littlest of children will toddle up to you with a book.
It seems almost instinctual, this desire for the written word. Humans long for stories.
I think this desire echoes back all the way to Genesis, when Moses says those great words, “In the Beginning…” The two most intense questions people ask have to do with beginnings and endings. ‘Where have we come from, and where are we going?’
The Bible itself begins with a story, similar to the ones told by flickering firelight in the time before Christ. Genesis reads like a fairytale. A sad one.
Some things can only be understood through stories.
Stories have immense power. Ask anyone who’s cried over a good book or found themselves laughing at a funny movie. With such a power to manipulate human thought and emotion, writing should not be taken lightly. Still, it seems like books today have become just as cheap as the mass-produced food we eat. The magic found in Phantasties and Treasure Island have all but disappeared from modern books. There is so little truth, beauty, or goodness left.
It is a sort of nameless ache people feel nowadays, a longing for a story that actually means something, whether it’s in the form of a movie, a book, or their own lives. It is man’s feverish search for meaning. We have become so secularized. Creators have forgotten how to put God into their writing. It’s not that I think every story should be considered Christian literature, but that the essence of something transcendent should be in every story– must be in every story– to make it worthwhile. This is why books no longer have the same quality as they used to. In our pride, humans have begun pretending there is nothing more important than us in the universe. We have desecrated the temple and erased the fingerprints of God.
I think this is why my own tastes in literature cater to the fantastical and mysterious. I like stories about dusty bookcases, sunflowers in clay jars, and the soft padding of feet on moonlit floorboards. But it is not just the things themselves I love, it is the connection I feel to something greater, something bigger.
I find God in the quiet places. In the gentle pull of a windy morning or the smell of pines and damp hay. Things that are utterly real, that are not touched by a simulacrum. We look at the painting and say ‘There must be an artist.’
Good writing takes the commonplace things and shows us how beautiful they really are. A book is supposed to wipe the dust of monotony off of life and reveal how wonderful it truly is.
I love the mountains more because I’ve read stories about them, and I love the sea more because of the tales I’ve read. Really, our world is no less beautiful and strange than any we could come up with, which are just shadows of real lands anyway.
It is only our fallen nature that makes us forget this.
But stories make us remember.
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