Follow Up

I often get into debates with my math/science friends with about the useful of my major (shocker it's English). The most recent quip I've heard it, "so basically you want to be unemployable." Great, fine, laugh. Let's ignore for a moment my Education minor and plan to become an English teacher. Let's also ignore the amount of hard work it's going to take and the amount of rejection I'm going to face, before I will hopefully be published one day. Instead, let's focus on what literature can give to the world. As I said in my last post, fantasy provides me with an escape. All literature does that. Literature reveals how humans think, how they react to each other and how they view the world at large. It helps us to work through social issues in the world and face injustices that may exist. Literature is an invaluable tool for sharing ideas and interacting with others because let's face it, not everything can be parsed down into 140 characters or less on Twitter. More than this though, it's the fact that literature is fiction that is so appealing. While this seems obvious, when I read fiction there are times when I get cynical. There is no way that some of the things that happen in books could happen in real life. (Even excluding books with unicorns or dragons) It's easy to look at fiction and feel disillusioned because there is no way in he** that some of the happy endings could happen. And yet we continue to read these books anyway. Why? Because we hope that one day maybe we'll have our own happy endings. And maybe things might not work out the way they do in books but if we make our own happy endings things will work out somehow. And maybe that sounds cliche. But maybe it doesn't matter. And even though I've used the word maybe too many times I think the point of this rambling post (why break tradition?) is that fiction has its place in the world and it might not cure cancer, but we need it anyway to give us hope while we're looking for the cure.