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... that one gets less imaginative as one gets older?
When I was little the border between real life and fantasy was very thin. Suspension of disbelief was trivial, for there was very little disbelief to suspend. My world-view was based upon observation, not expectation: the impossible was not bound by rules but only by what I had not yet observed.
Stories then made an indelible impression. That they were fiction was irrelevant: while they were being told they were very real for me, and often a conceit persisted in my thoughts so long that eventually I convinced myself it was true. Even now I can tell many of my memories to be fabricated only by their physical impossibility. Play-acting, improvisation and day-dreaming were second nature.
Nowadays I tend to read stories as I read newspaper articles: skimming them for the facts, discarding extraneous prose, analysing, considering, moving on. I no longer have the vivid pictures in my head I once did. Everything is black and white, clinical, compartmentalised: false. This is not to say I gain nothing experience of reading novels, listening to music, watching films, only that I don't gain as much as I used to. Today's experience is muffled, hissing cassette tape compared to yesterday's Dolby Surround. The only time I manage to regain some of it is to wait until I am very tired; only then does my brain slow down enough to let me experience it without judgement or distraction.
The change seems to have taken place over the last ten or twelve years, coinciding with the shift from childhood to adulthood, from exploration to experience, from instability to equilibrium. That equilibrium is seductive. Looking at those a generation ahead, there are those who have let original thought fade away, their lives turn bland and monotonous, their imaginations and senses of wonder having withered away decades ago. I would like to hope that such a thing should never happen to me, but I wonder if the worst has already happened.
Does any of this sound familiar to you?
David
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