The first anniversary of my blog... what’s the point?

"This is a work of fiction. A few liberties have been taken with the historical record in the interests of the truth."

(Quote on the copyright page of the 2009 Random House Trade Paperback Edition of The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie.)

The point, to me is and always has been that the truth is fiction, or, fiction is the truth.

From the time I first started reading, once I got past the age of five or so, the 'I can read' sentences time, like See Dick and Jane run. Run Dick run. Run Jane run. Run run run...



I’ve read fiction to go away to find separated places that meant I’d found the truth of life when I found their far countries, and stayed to live down inside their pages and pages. And that's where I found connection.


When Boo Radley shuffled to his feet, light from the living room windows glistened on his forehead. Every move he made was uncertain, as if he were not sure his hands and feet could make proper contact with the things he touched. He coughed his dreadful railing cough, and was so shaken he had to sit down again. His hand searched for his hip pocket, and he pulled out a handkerchief. He coughed into it, then he wiped his forehead.
Having been so accustomed to his absence, I found it incredible that he had been sitting beside me all this time, present. He had not made a sound. ----- from To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee




It seems I've spent most of my lifetime with an inner monologue spinning along inside; speaking and thinking differently than anything I ever did say, or felt permitted to say. Inside the separated places in fiction, I found compatibility; realities often more palpable and more palatable, and more real than whatever current reality I happened to be inhabiting.



It is his extremity that I seemed to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all the truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.
Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry - much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory. ----
from Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

My guess is, most people have this feeling - hence the need for fictions built as temporary buttresses against the world, or as explanations, or as excuses; perhaps finessed accompinaments - written words, film, songs and the theater. Most of all, for me, the form of the novel, holding words on bound pages in my hands, because that is where I am able to do my own world-building, never mind another's picture, or idea of set scene.




He stood hat in hand over the unmarked earth. This woman who had worked for his family fifty years. She had cared for his mother as a baby and she had worked for his family long before his mother was born and she had known and cared for the wild Grady boys who were his mother's uncles and who had all died so long ago and he stood holding his hat and he called her his abuela and he said goodbye to her in spanish and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or the rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. -----
from All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy

I guess that's why we're all here together, isn't it, and why we all know each other.

We all love stories - fiction, what passes for non-fiction, and the mixture in-between.

So happy anniversary, you all, and thanks for being around.

And thanks, BT, for helping me figure out how to get this set up in the first place, a year ago tomorrow.