Of Art and Fiction

My peers have always wondered where I get my inspirations. Apparently this seems even more so now that I have already 10 entries in my Blog in a relative short time (though I still feel there are many people who have done better). Usually I would just say that I enjoy reading in my free time and it is from books that I draw my ideas and knowledge. As the Roman playwright Seneca puts it: Leisure without literature is death, or rather the burial of a living man.

So some of them wonder how come they read a lot as well but cannot seem to achieve the same effect. Upon further enquiry, I realised that it was because they had read mainly non-fiction books. They argue that non-fiction books would be the fastest and most effective way to gain knowledge, and widen their scope. I do not deny the benefits of non-fiction, but for the record I usually read fiction and the proportion of fiction to non-fiction books I normally read is around 8 to 2 (or 80%).

It is in stories and novels that the author attempts to share certain ideas, perspectives and emotions with the readers. Some stories are about real people, real events and real places and the author challenges to bring you there instead of just presenting cold hard facts. While some non-fiction books tend to bore you, fiction books seek to entertain as well as invoke interest and imagination to explore more. As the genius Albert Einstein once said: Imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is limited while imagination embraces the entire world.

Literature is a form of art. It is an expression of human thoughts and emotions. Yet detractors find art to be a redundance of society, for it is no more than a reflection of truth and not truth itself. Yet I think the famous artist Picasso sums it best as: We know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth. A thought worth pondering about.

So I have friends who confessed that it is hard to pick up fiction books, and they are put off by the large number of pages and sometimes the difficulty in understanding what the author is trying to convey. Maybe you can try this tip which I practise whenever I step into a library or bookstore. I would pick up a book, read the back to see if the story interests me, then flip to somewhere in the centre and read a paragraph or two to gauge its language level. You can choose something simple to start with, and not necessarily wordy. In fact, it would be nice to select a book of short stories.

While I still feel that I may not be that ideal as a role model, I believe that I had benefitted much from the reading habit I had nurtured. However it still comes down to a matter of personal choice and I was just only sharing a little about myself.