Fiction

I'm on leave now, and having a drink on your first night of leave is totally okay... but I've only had one mouthful, barely that. It's not the drink, but... I just picked up a book - something that mentioned King Arthur - and I was suddenly overwhelmed with this sense of the great aedifice that is fiction. All these stories, all these worlds... Some of them have lived for a thousand years, with each new generation, each new storyteller, adding their own bit. Some of them are born from the imagination of a single man or woman. Some are being born even now. And they are all so real. There's an entire universe of fiction, like our world, but bigger, better, deeper... not real, but made real by living in the imaginations of so many people over the years. Old themes get reworked by new storytellers. Characters stray into other works, and have resonance, for all the tales they have walked through before. A single word can bring with it a world of assocations and emotions. Whole worlds exist behind a single turn of phrase.

I felt as if I was staring into the face of magic. I felt awed, and I burst into tears. I'm still crying now.

And, really, honestly, I have only had one small mouthful of wine.

I don't normally talk about real emotions. I will be embarrassed by this post soon.