Solipsism

While reading my latest literary conquest, The Catastrophist, by Ronan Bennett, I came across a passage that struck me as quite an interesting insight and one that pertained to me and the way I read novels.

"...I stayed in my room and read novels. With one eye I watched the characters rise from the page, with the other I watched my own life. It sounds solipsistic, but reading about imaginary others made me intensely curious about my real self. Before then I had sent few queries in my own direction*. Once I started reading I entered a period of introspection and self-examination; fiction referred to me questions I had not even known how to formulate. It was like being forced to stand naked in front of the mirror in a harsh and unflattering light."

*This one sentence does not pertain to me, as I often question myself and my motives.

I always find it refreshing to find a passage that so eloquently puts in words what I feel and am unable to properly express to others. It has also come across my mind whether or not others read in this fashion, comparing themselves to characters and posing the questions the author has seemingly tried to answer him- or herself. As a very wise woman once said to me (and she knows who she is), "It's easier to look out the window than it is to look in the mirror." This is what books and their authors help me to do: look in the mirror and face the facts about myself, the good and ugly.

The character who wrote this passage is a writer, and he delves into this topic even further:

"I did not like the reflection cast back at me. I saw vanity, arrogance, self-importance, cowardice, I saw the meanness of my own motives. I started writing, I think, because I saw in words a way to cover myself up. In fairness, I did not try to use writing as reinvention, or as an advertisement, a sign behind which I could hide and say I was better than I was. Instead I rendered everything as a kind of sly joke, including the characters in which I breathed. That way I was only one more joke among many, my failings were invisible..."

As a writer, I found this admission so endearing, so brave, that the author of those words has looked that deep inside himself to understand and reveal his intentions, no matter how bad it might sound to the reader. To know oneself so fully is truly a blessing, one that is extremely hard to pull out from the layers of false pretenses we use to fool others.

I have asked the question to myself and other writers: Why do you write? I wonder if any of them know the true reason, and if they do, are they willing to admit it to themselves. I know the reason I write; I just don't know if I'm as brave as Ronan Bennett to admit it to other people!