Connections and the Reality of Fiction

I have said before that the reason I like history is I like stories and how they connect.  For some reason my brain works this way so I connect various events and find some common thread among them.  If you read this blog you can tell that each post has a theme, but I give various examples and life experiences for each.  This isn’t a skill I naturally knew; I actually was trained to do it.  I was tutored in English since middle school to be able to write and do this type of critical thinking.  I always thought it was a bad thing to have tutoring even though for Indians it is pretty normal.  I guess people usual assume that if somebody is good at something they are naturally good at it, so not meeting that expectation felt bad. 

When I was in middle school I could barely write five sentences and make a paragraph.  I felt what I had to say was obvious and that is good enough.  I had to put in the effort to learn how to write proper papers and how to convey my message.  This is especially true for English tests like the SAT.  The essay portion gives you a prompt and you have to support or not support it using evidence from history, literature, life experience, etc.  It is pretty much pick a side and support it with evidence from different aspects.  That is how I reason out things in real life now; I pull from various sources and try to find the answer.

Something I do very specifically is pull from literary sources.  For the SAT you obviously have to do that, but I don’t think everybody tries to apply it to daily life.  It is that age old question: which is more true, fiction or reality? The answer seems obviously reality, but fiction is just a way to distill the essence of real life and present it in another form. Gus made sure I knew that fiction serves to guide us when the reality around us can’t.  We can find truth in it that may give us better advice than reality.  That is what authors try to convey through their works.

A good example of this, is in the Tale of Genji.  One of the characters is trapped by Genji who is using her in a game.  Let’s just say he is attracted to her but isn’t allowed to have her, so he plays out his fantasies through teasing other men with her…yeah Japanese literature!  Anyway, she has never experienced anything like this before and doesn’t know how to handle the situation, but she finds people who wrote fiction stories about a similar situation and reads them as people who empathize and who know the way to escape.  In the story, fiction helps the main character more than reality as she tries to break the fake reality that Genji creates around her for his own pleasure. 

In the end, is it so easy to bind all these things together?  Can something in history so easily connect to something that I’ve experience to something that I read in a book or is that just me forcing a connection where there isn’t one?  When I read Lenin in Japanese History class, the teacher pointed out Lenin’s definition of Imperialism and asked us what was wrong with it.  When nobody could answer he said, “It is a very nice list that is completely correct; the only problem with it is that it is a list.”  Lists are step by step or distinct points, but they do not show the interaction and the multiple causes and effects among things.  To understand true interaction among items, you have to be careful not to just compare and contrast, but show the dynamics and logic among what are seemingly distinct events.  I believe with that approach, the connections can be formed and a common thread can be found.

Thinking about Friendships on Valentine's Day

So yesterday I thought a lot about people who are gone from my life.  It was because of the males in KAF playing Cards Against Humanity and us realizing that Kohei would have loved it.  I haven’t actually thought of Kohei for a long time, even though we have had many good times together.  I was very sad when he left, but I mean life goes on, but that doesn’t mean that I forgot him completely.  I feel it is ok to forget some things temporarily but then remember them randomly.  Yesterday I thought, “Kohei would have liked this game,” and remember the good times with him.  I think that is good enough. 

A similar event also happened that day.  I was telling the story about how Arden gave me fudge mix and I gave her some of the fudge on White Day. I remembered how my mom and I made that and I felt pretty nostalgic about that.  I think as long as I have moments like this I should be fine.  People still ask me all these questions like, “What do you miss most?” or, “What is your best memory?”  Is it an interview?  I have these feelings in the moment, not something that I can spit out like an elevator speech. 

A slightly different thing I had to encounter is not people who left, but people who are drifting.  At least two groups of friends have admitted to have drifted apart.  I feel that is pretty normal; I don’t talk to a lot of people from first year or from any time period from my life.  In a sense I still can treat people who drift away with the same mentality as people who left.  Even if I encounter a person again, the relationship between us has changed.  We may be nostalgic, but friendships have to be maintained so being separated really does destroy the relationship.  I can still hear my former friend’s voice saying, “don’t talk to me.” Random aside but even though we were friends for so long, just being separate for a few years meant we were not friends anymore.  The only way to bring it back is working at the relationship.  Friendship is work; that is how I perceive it.  With my mindset, a friendship can depreciate if you don’t constantly put in effort.

Something Lynn posted today was "...when we remember we remember only what was forgotten. Each time we remember we remember forgetting. Thus the only thing remembrance remembers is obviously not itself, but it's other, namely forgetting." As I said, it is how we try to dig out all the emotions and feelings from the memory, but we can't get them all. Maybe in the end the biggest thing we get out of remembering something is that we forgot a huge part of it, and the stuff we remember is a copy of the true memory we forgot.

Even by writing all of this down I can’t preserve all the feelings I had.  Renaissance poets said that poetry can allow something to be immortal, but this is really my attempt to preserve how I feel about things.  Even as friends leave my life, I guess I can look back at posts like this and remember the me of the time, the mindset I had, and the people who surrounded me throughout my life.