Weekly Blog Post 1

"The reality is more excellent than the report."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Through fiction several seemingly impossible instances are revealed to the public so they may be able to experience beyond their typical routine and life. Writers have the capacity to manipulate and mold the thinking of the reader merely with words, illustrating base human desire and struggle. Writing has the ability to steal the minds of the audience, enrapturing them with impossible yet realistic scenarios. Authors can eloquently write a beautiful story, but the thing is that the stories that are the most enthralling are almost always fiction. Why do people become so obsessed over certain collections of novels when truly there is virtually no substantial reality that the story could be based on? Emerson essentially argues that reality is better than the fabricated truth of a story be it fiction or non. I disagree with this quote because even if the event did occur, such as the retelling of climbing Mount Everest, the story is more exciting than the reality. Communication illustrates the instinct to tell a story to share personal experience, morals, or basically anything to another living human being. According to the Buddhist religion one of the three basic needs of human life for an individual to be acknowledged by another human, the need to tell and retell stories has meaning for any individual. Therefore the "report" has a cathartic effect for the individual in that he or she is being acknowledged by the listener or reader. The story also enables the audience to be able to more or less experience what the person telling the story has. Books especially allow the audience to appreciate a story, primarily fiction, because like art the book is open to the interpretation of the person or people who read it even if the author intended the work to invoke a specific emotion or memory. The mind runs wild and the author simply guides it using the words in the passage to bring a collective audience to experience the same actions and conversations as everyone else. The false shared experiences of the people help them identify with various unlikely occurrences in the world such as past wars. The "report" as Emerson calls it allows people to safely imagine their own reality or follow a character in a nonfiction story earning about their life while keeping at a safe distance so not to get involved in any tragedy or even happiness that is not their own. Reality can be interesting but the report of what actually occurred can be molded into the imagination of an individual enhancing the story and possibly making it more exciting, while the writer gets a catharsis out of sharing their story with any audience.