THE MEANING OF LIFE by The School of Life

When I was young, I always found myself longing to have a family where its members spoke like in the books! They (including myself) were rational in their thinking, they were talking calmly, and everything they said made sense.
Of course, this was not happening in my life. And for this reason alone, I thought that there was something wrong with my family.
Recently, a younger friend of mine, who likes to read as much as I read, told me that she thought the same about her family when she was young!!!

Luckily, The School of Life explained to me why in real life, the families’ members do not talk like in the books, through their own book “The meaning of life”:

“The core, and perhaps unexpected, thing that books do for us is simplify.

Centrally, by telling a story, a book is radically simpler than lived experience.
The writer omits a huge amount of detail that could have been included.
In a story, the key events of a marriage unfold across a few dozen pages.
In life, they are spread over many years and interleaved with hundreds of business meetings, holidays, hours spent watching television, chats with one’s parents, shopping trips and dentist’s appointments.

Writers often do a lot of explaining along the way.
They frequently shed light on why a character is acting as they do; they reveal people’s secret thoughts and motives. The characters are much more clearly defined than the acquaintances we encounter. They and their actions provide us with simplified targets for our emotional lives.

We need simplification because our minds become checkmated by the complexity of our lives.

The writer, on rare but hugely significant occasions, puts into words feelings that have long eluded us; they know us better than we know ourselves. They seem to be narrating our own stories, but with more clarity than we could ever achieve.

The great writers build bridges to people we might otherwise have dismissed as unfeasibly strange or unsympathetic. By selection and emphasis, they reveal the important things we share. They show us where to look.

They also help us to feel.”

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“Newspapers and friends recommend books to us because they work for them, without thinking through why they might also works for us.”

That is why in my blog www.exlibrismeis.com I talk about what I have learned from the books I read and what impressed me. Because I believe that we can all read the same book, yet each of us will find a completely different motive to enjoy it.

“But when we come across the ideal book for us, we are presented with a clearer, more lucid, better-organised account of our own concerns and experiences.

For a time at least, our minds become less clouded and our hearts more accurately sensitive.

Through books’ benign simplification, we become a little better at being who we truly are.”

Kindle, 2021