Confessions of an impractical person

For some reason, fiction and the real world seemed to share no similarity. 
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In the beginning, I was not a bookworm. In fact, I considered artistic and literary works to be useless. Lacking artistic qualities myself, I believed that the world does not need more artists to make it a better place, but it required “practical” people such as scientists, politicians, and reformers.

I stopped believing in these strange ideas four years ago. The pandemic coincided with a significant phase in my life — the transition from childhood to adolescence. During this period, faced with the harsh realities of life, I turned to literature — to escape from boredom and the world. My love for music grew too. I would spend almost half of each day listening to piano and orchestral pieces and imagining fantastical scenes to match the music. By the time the pandemic was over, I became aware of the reformation I had underwent. A whole year I spent in bliss, a happy, optimistic person finally acknowledging the importance and beauty of both science and art.

Like the protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s White Nights, I began to seek romance in every aspect of life. Like the narrator of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, I began “taking dreams for reality”. I tried to ignore the imperfection of life by finding solace in the perfection of art.

And this was when I lost all of my practicality, which I never actually possessed in the first place. The only version of life I had known is the idealised one, and to cling onto this version, I fell more and more in love with literature. For some reason, fiction and the real world seemed to share no similarity. The characters treated with so much compassion in fiction are laughed at in the real world. Thus, I began to believe that comparing my failures and flaws to that of my favourite literary characters would help me empathise with myself and reduce the self-hatred so prevalent in almost every adolescent. So, I began to imagine myself as the protagonist of some epic novel. My literary version was an exaggerated version of myself. I justified all my flaws with eloquent reasoning, like the protagonist of Notes from Underground. Literature became real world, and the real world felt like a dream.

My usage of past tense in this confession does not mean that I am not impractical any more. I still treat myself as a character of some novel. I still spend most of my time in literary worlds. I read the newspaper as a form of entertainment; from literature I obtain information. And at the end of the day, I am not ashamed of being impractical. I am not ashamed of despising self-help books. I am not ashamed of being a dreamer. Fiction is, after all, a product of the real world. Through fiction, I will be reconciled to reality. I will finally realise that reality is not a tragedy we have all been condemned to behold. Reality is a reminder that perfection is hard to achieve. Through literature, and art as a whole, I wish to not escape this imperfection, but behold it with awe. To conclude, I want, as Oscar Wilde said, “life to imitate art” as well as art to imitate life. With this mutual imitation, will come unification of art and reality, of perfect and imperfect, of dreams and life, of practicality and impracticality.

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