Why do we love the stories (books/movies/TV shows/whatever) that we do? I have read things that everybody else loves or thinks is the greatest book ever written and I just can't get into it, while there are books I love that nobody else has ever heard of or put down after the first five pages, and I have to admit, a few of my favorite books are written for very young children, and as I never read them as a child, it is not simply nostalgia on my part. What is it that attracts our particular regard to a certain story? Is it as the psalmist has it, 'deep crying out to deep?' Is there something in a particular story that speaks to us but not to the world in general? Is it because I have 'eyes to see and ears to hear' in a particular tale that others are lacking (and that I lack when it comes to their favorites)? Is that why Jesus spoke in parables?
Good questions, all, and none easy to answer, except perhaps for myself, for I can know no other heart or mind so well. I look at my favorites and see common themes: love, adventure, hope, struggle against some appalling evil, characters that grow and struggle and sometimes fail, a plot that keeps you guessing how it will end, a world as deep and beautiful and mysterious as our own, and eventually, a happy ending. There is also a longing or search for home and oftentimes a courageous, gentle, faithful heroine. Then I look at my own life, my own personality, and see that in those stories I find things I never had but always wanted or hope to attain or the traits I long for in a friend or sister. Sometimes I wish I could befriend those fictional ladies, but alas, they exist only within the pages of their particular tome and I only know them as deeply as the author has revealed.
G.K. Chesterton once remarked that it is easier to love fictional characters than the real thing, and I believe he is right. For we do not have to live with and interact with our fictional friends, but rather can put the book on the shelf when we tire of them. But we live in a world filled with countless 'characters,' each with their own story, and we cannot just close the book when we tire of them but must learn to live peaceably with them, as they must with us. Which makes me wonder what my own story will be like once it is fully writ, will my own novel be something I would wish to pick up and read again, as I reread my favorite books or will I look at it in disgust and throw it on the fire? That's a humbling thought indeed! Perhaps the world would be a far better place if we remembered we are each writing our own story and one day will have to review it: are we living so that it is a tale worth retelling?
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