Realer Friends Than My Real Friends

When I was at the age of five, my mother read to me The Chronicles of Narnia. She'd been reading books to me since before I was born, yes, but there was something slight and undefinable about this particular series that was enough to ignite in me a constant need for a story. My younger sister and I had hugely vivid imaginations, and would act out scenes from Narnia in our back yard, usually resulting in a fight over who got to be Lucy. She was a favorite, for whatever exact reason.

My mother read dozens of stories to me at that age and older, even—I remember she read to me Understood Betsy when I was around ten years old. I learned several stories this way, including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (which sparked a rather deep love for Lewis Carrol in me), and children’s versions of plays by Shakespeare.

As I grew older, this stuck with me. I found myself daydreaming about a character’s world rather than my own. How I would prefer it, or how well I would live alongside those characters. I was going to marry Artemis Fowl. When I first had the opportunity to visit Oxford at the age of fourteen, I felt that my joy could only be completed if it was indeed Inspector Morse’s Oxford, or the Oxford belonging to The Northern Lights’ Lyra.

This has never stopped. At the age of fifteen, I had Hamlet confiscated from me by my mother, who stated that it was too distracting to me. Yes, I had memorized our dear tragic hero’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, rather than been completely any actual homework assignments, but to me it was a great deal better a thing to do anyway.

I cannot function without a story of some kind—or without the characters that create them. The level of meaning that a character, once you understand it, can have in a reader is truly astounding. These are people about whom one may come to know more about than their own acquaintances; they are people who can teach you about what real people might be like—in a sense, realer than real.

Often, where my sister and I wished we were

Through literature, I have been able to gain an ability to observe and understand humanity in a way that I may otherwise have been stunted in. My mind can identify a trait, compare it with what I have learned from a story or a character, and then be able to recognize a need or pattern someone may have based upon it. Stories have “morals” for a reason.

I cannot count, either, the amount of times which I have found myself deeply rooted within the personality of a character. Often, a character may be one of the few people an avid reader may be able to relate to. It saddens me, too, how often these readers get called things like “silly” or “pretentious”—to me, those accusers only show how little they know by behaving in such a way. Relating to a character is one of the most self-observant things a reader can do, enabling them to see a flaw (or a quality) which the character possesses, and be able to search for it within themselves.

Literature both shapes and is shaped by mankind, in the most complementary way possible. It blends beautifully with society, and yet pushes it, doubts it and condemns it. It is literature that has brought some of the greatest changes to be, in some form or other, and it is not something that should continue to be taken as lightly as it may seem to be now.