Learning from Stories

I wrote this once for another blog, and now I'll share it here, without editing (maybe someday I will edit it), because otherwise I won't be likely to post it.

 

When looking back at my childhood, many things seem odd about it. One thing that is perhaps odd, but definitely interesting to me, is how I learned what I know. It is very likely that I do not really know the whole case at all, but I will attempt to speak about one aspect of it at least.

One thing my siblings and I benefited from was being read to a great deal by our mother, and occasionally our father. We would all load up on or around my mother’s recliner armchair, and try to see the books ourselves (selfish imps). She collected (not sure how, actually) books that she felt were good literature, with nice illustrations. Older books, perhaps, in general, but some might have been quite new, too. I do not know for sure.

I must have taken these stories seriously, but not that I imagined them to be part of life; I never seemed to really do that. Instead, I took very seriously the elements implied in them, and seemed to subconsciously divide truth from the fantastical. Probably, it seems to me now, very intensely. It is very hard to articulate what I was doing, and how it was; I do have a grasp of this in my head, but it is hard to grasp at, like one talks of clouds being. I learned a great deal from this, nonetheless.

As I wander around life now, I find out more and more things that I must have learned from those books, and from books read later in my life. But the earliest books we read were perhaps the most informative, being read to me in the time when I was more capable of ‘forming impressions’. It seems that the more rational you get, the more things cover up the absorbing of new things, as, perhaps, you spend time consciously bothering your head about previously absorbed information.

I feel that in hearing those books, I formed a clearer idea of how the world works in a big-picture way; the sort of patterns the world holds, and thus what sort of things make sense, and what don’t, so I can distinguish between logical  and illogical more quickly.

People do put a lot of import on stories for forming, and I believe it is probably partly due to seeing many different parts of the world in a way that takes you in, so you care about it. I do not think we necessarily read a great variety of stories, but for whatever reason, it was instrumental in giving me a concept of how varied the world really is, to the point that I am not easily surprised by things now.

The climax of this story-learning was when I read The Lord of the Rings when I was eleven. It seems that then, as had never happened before, the Picture fell into place simply and profoundly, and I could see the world properly for the first time. Somehow, in the conscious bit of my brain, things didn’t make much sense to me previous to my eleventh year, and when I read The Lord of the Rings, that more unconscious bit of me finally pushed its leaves out of the dirt and came to the light of the sun. It was as if the framework necessary for knowledge itself was finally put into place.

And I insist that this is in no wishy-washy, fantastical way, as I am not exactly a fairy-tale person. But you can believe me or you can not.

 

As a parting note, I believe it matters what sort of stories one is reading, that they be good stories. That will be for another time, if ever, but I do not believe all such things are equal, except if you wish to simply be informed of the wisdoms and stupidities of human beings as a study, and you don't intend to necessarily become wiser at the same time.