why I read fiction
I’ve been trying to make an Instagram post asking, “Why is reading fiction important?” and to give some reasoning behind it, beyond the usual arguments: increasing synaptic connections in both hemispheres, helping with logic, improving empathy, and experiencing other lives while living a single lifetime, and so on… You know, something less heard of.
So I searched, and I came across a YouTube video where a guy explains the domains we consume or contribute to: History (where do we come from?), Science (how do things work?), Metaphysics (the meaning behind existence, the why), Desires (our wants and needs), and finally, Art and Literature (what it actually is to be human, at a certain time or under certain circumstances).
It continued by explaining what happens when a society prioritises one domain over the others, and so on… It was a great video; a true must watch.
I’ve been dwelling on it for a while, thinking about how I should formulate it in Farsi and make it appealing to my audience, which eventually turned the question back onto me: why do I read fiction? I’m the type who either has a book at hand or thinks, “oh, I wish I had a book on me,” to the point that recently I decided I want to put a pause on my life and just be, and do everything I want. So I almost always read and eventually started making content around my reading, just for fun. Up until today, I’d never thought about the reason behind it. Why did I choose to read? Why not exercising, or knitting, or movies, or I don’t know, anything else?
Finally, it hit me. After my father’s passing, my life began to feel like a vacuum. I feel like a tiny particle floating into nothingness, to the point that when my husband goes to work and there’s no one to perceive me, I feel numb. Reading fiction, for some reason, gives me a kind of comfort, like standing out in the cold, peeking through someone’s window, watching a life quietly unfold in front of you. Life and its mundanity bubbling through the interactions of the people inside: people coming and going, chatter, sometimes fights, laughter, and somehow you feel the warmth seeping through the glass, reaching you outside, still alone in the cold, in the quietness of a road dragged from somewhere and leading to nowhere.
My Baba’s death became that major life event, where it feels like everything before it was leading up to that day and his funeral, and the days after were the final pages of a book, tying up loose ends to give a clean closure to the audience (which audience?!) and then there was nothing.
Honestly, if you had asked me a year ago, “what do you think happens after your father dies?” I would’ve predicted grief, major loss, devastation, sadness. Right? But there was no way I could’ve predicted this nothingness, this painful numbness. His death became a heavy, amorphous mass, pulling, gravitating my being into nothingness with it. Tbh, I had no idea I loved him this much. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I loved anyone more than I loved him, but still, I didn’t know the roots of my love for him went as deep as the core of my being. Reading became comforting in a way I hadn’t expected. It’s like having a prosthetic existence for an amputated life you left behind in a war scene.