315. To Live A Story

You’re looking through some old books when you come across a story with a strange title. You start reading out of curiosity and the text soon has your full attention. The language isn’t groundbreaking but the plot is exciting and the characters are entertaining. You want to find out what happens next, so you keep reading.

As the story progresses, you learn more and more about the characters. They have ideas, concerns, memories, desires, and hopes just like you do. They have entire lives they seem to be living, and you gradually become immersed in them. They stop being just characters and they start feeling like real people.

You relate to the characters’ lives because they are in some ways similar to your own life. The plot of the story doesn’t feel as important as before. You still want to find out what happens, but mainly because it’s happening to these people you care about.

The story is no longer about the words you’re reading or the events that are happening. It’s now about something further, something you cannot quite name but that nonetheless feels very important. The story has hooked into your own experiences and now you are not just reading, you are vicariously living the story as it unfolds.

You’re experiencing what the characters are experiencing because you care deeply about them. The story no longer operates merely on the level of words, ideas, and language but on another that feels more primary to your own existence. It seems to be about who you are and the way life itself is. It seems to have exceeded even the boundaries of your own reflective consciousness, as you cannot fully identify what the story is doing to you.

Even after you finish reading, you cannot grasp what has happened. All you can say is that you’ve been touched in an important way. You are no longer the person who saw the strange title and started reading out of innocent curiosity. You have now grown into something greater: a being slightly more aware of its own existence.