The Trappings of Fiction

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Some of you may recall an older post called "Buffy will lead me to hell" in which i elucidated the process by which i become wrapped up in the show and stop doing anything productive.  i thought that this was on account of the nature of the show itself.  It seems, however, that pretty much any fictional world in which i find comfort and relief is able to pretty effectively render me a spiritual vegetable.  i just stop caring about anything because it seems so much easier to just be somewhere else.  Case in point: i recently began listening to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on my ipod during my walk to and from work – just to help pass the time.  This time has since expanded to cover the period from my walk home until i go to bed – too often including the actual point where i fall asleep.  Certainly there are certain cases in which this behavior has been appropriate – doing the dishes, cooking dinner, etc., moments when i would like to be distracted from the unpleasant task at hand.  However, you may notice that listening from the time i leave work until the time i am asleep does not leave room for, say, reading the Writings or, maybe, Obligatory Prayer, or visiting the Shrines that i pass by on my way home, or any other activities that might serve to, oh, i don’t know, SUSTAIN MY SOUL.

The ease with which i sacrifice my spiritual well-being for other worlds that i, for whatever reason, find more delightful (admittedly, it’s probably because i don’t have to worry about my spiritual well-being in these other worlds), concerns me.  i mean, for all intents and purposes, these worlds are nothing more than idle fancies and, at times, even vain imaginings.  Now before you fiction lovers start defending your right to read with irrelevant comments like "i read fiction because i blah blah blah, not because blah blah blah, and i think that’s fine because i’m the kind of person that blah blah blah", let me state clearly that i do not think the fault here lies in fiction.  i cannot believe that fiction is meant to be eliminated in an ideal spiritual world.  Surely it serves a purpose and, like anything else that can be used wisely, i just have a tendency to abuse it.  It occurs to me that this could be an outcropping of my being essentially prohibited from those things that i might otherwise abuse (i.e. sex, drugs, alcohol).  Which leads to the solution that i must either marry quickly (which, let’s face it, is not an ideal solution) or…um…i guess learn to become intoxicated by the wine of the love of God – which happens not infrequently, but by no discernable pattern on my part, and which i certainly have not mastered such that it would deter me from other forms of, well, delight.  It just takes so much less everything on my part to become intoxicated with the wine of Harry Potter. 

Now, my previous comment about those inappropriate comments that people tend to leave was not meant to apply to those comments that are actually relevant to this conundrum – just those that are born of people’s desperation to assert their righteousness.  Save your righteousness for your own blog.  This is my righteous space.  However, if you have something interesting to say about the addictiveness of fiction (or other modes of creative enjoyment) or the tendency of humans to want to escape their spiritual destinies (or their present realities), or just the ease with which we get distracted from our purpose, please do participate.  Because that is, after all, what this post is about, and not, as some might be misled to believe, the merits or lack thereof of fiction and other products of creativity (which may, at a later date, be a vaguely interesting, though over-visited and probably not very fruitful, topic of discussion).

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