Well,
okay, here I’m kidding a bit. But
the idea is: One can elaborate a
fantasy life, parallel to one’s daily routine, and quite as rich and
satisfying; and not even particularly autistic, as it can sometimes enjoyably
be shared. (Cf. C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy.) Perhaps this is no more
than a Lesson Learned (being not applicable to everybody); or (if indeed
universal) perhaps it is only a variant of Idea 4 (“Free invention of
structures”), the created structures here
being literary rather than mathematical. I am wont to spend dreamy afternoons on Planet Penguin, a
land of fantastical lore, turning over and over the immemorial Legends of the
Penguins: much as one may lead an
alternate existence in the World of Dickens – much as Mr. McCawber does.
Perhaps
it is just a fancy; or perhaps there is something more to it. Whose are those
eyes, behind the skies, glinting in amusement at our earthly shadow-play?!
Footnote:
Positively to enrol this bit of whimsy among the stern
centurions of Leading Ideas, would be taken amiss, as it is not something
generally accepted. To argue for
its validity would require an essay in itself, and that is not the purpose of
the present sketch, which does not mean to prove things, but simply to notice
them. Still, a couple of brief
ink-tracings from the thumbnail, to demonstrate that the thing might be made to
work.
George Orwell, no sentimentalist, in his penetrating – even
steely-eyed – essay on Dickens, says of that novelist’s characters:
They are monsters,
but at any rate they exist.
(Emphasis in original.) One could say much the same thing about: Fermat primes; Julius Caesar; our
fellow-men, as (mis)perceived and (mis)conceived by ourselves. The World of Dickens, aptly so called,
is as rich a shared environment
as is this living-room.
True, you and I know different parts of that world, and react to them
differently; but so do any husband and wife react differently to their
living-room, some aspects being prominent for one that are effectively
invisible to the other. (Our own,
I suppose, has drapes, though I couldn’t say for sure, and have no idea what
they look like.)
The Idea acquires bite when one realizes that not only a
master like Dickens can create an encompassing work of fiction. One can oneself; and the work in
question is one’s literal life, considered subjectively as lived, rather
than as in your obituary. Here I
don’t mean to allude to the lives of imposters or anything of the sort. The idea is that one’s own life is
structured – eventually, consciously
structured – as a narrative. (Sometimes
I fantasize I work at a super-secret all-knowing mathematico-linguistical Organization; sometimes it seems so real.) At the extreme, this can lead to Walter
Mitty, who is not widely admired, though he is better to be envied than, say,
Bartleby the Scrivener, with no shaping self-narrative at all.
Familiar
examples of this sort of thing include lives that are shaped and directed by
one transcendent and magnetic lodestar – say, to become King of the Blues. Many Christians have led lives
structured at every step by their own perceived progress towards
Salvation; they still show up at
their day job, and remember to buy bread on the way home, but all this is but
bunting around the central stage of their lived drama. We may even allude to a sort of
reverse of Walter Mitty (an ordinary man with fantasies of heroism and
adventure): Superman. In (his) reality, he was
Superman; yet felt it necessary to structure his existence by the adoption of
an entire, quite hazardous and very time-consuming, alternate identity as that
Everyschlump, Clark Kent.
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