Jeanette Winterson
The first part of this quote is actually a really important argument in defence of reading and books I think. Whilst I am a strong supporter of listening to folk with lived experience of something - they know best what it means for them - I also believe your own personal experience is not the whole story.
One simply can't say I know all about this because this is what happened to me; or this is what I see; or this is where I live; or this is my life and that is the end of that. For me the world has any number of angles, facets, and perspectives and we all experience it differently and the more we can understand other folks' positions and views and experience the fuller picture we can see.
We can't get out and travel everywhere and talk to everybody in the world and so we read. Reading takes us to places, inside people's minds and thoughts and all sorts of ways of being and thinning that are outside our own experience and that helps us understand the world better.
In some cases it does allow us to live another life in the sense of experiencing somewhat vicariously, what it might have been like to be a dancer in Paris in the 1800s or a soldier in Flanders Fields, or a wealthy woman in The UK or a teenager in the 50s...
The same can possibly be said for watching movies or plays, but for me, reading is the way I go about it.
From the rainbow stack of books in our home in Maleny. I collected the books for their cover colours, not for their content, and have to admit to never having read any of the books in the stack...
A beautiful post Fiona, and your thoughts resonated with me; we can't fully know a life from reading a book but we gain a deeper understanding of things that we have no direct experience with. I've often said all we can ever really know is based on what people choose to tell us. There may be historical references that can support what they write but it is still not all there is to know.
ReplyDeleteIt is so true that we can only know what people tell us - and we are all such unreliable narrators in oh so many ways and for oh so many reasons... reading does help fill things out for us but nothing is ever complete. In part, I think that is why absolutists and folk of immense certainty scare me a bit.
Delete