More than Eden

I know you, and you know me. I am the person sitting cross-legged in the back-aisle of the book store, my nose buried in fantasy, and you are the one who sidles by, as though touching me will infect you with some carefully avoided disease. There is an odd look on your face; perhaps it is pity. I understand the sentiment. After all, at sixteen, I am too old for such things. Fantasy is frivolous and self-indulgent, and responsible people abandon it upon maturity. It is long past time now that I left this childish tangled root-mass of ideas for the reason of adulthood, which rings out certain and pure like a bell.

There is more to fantasy, though, than self-indulgent entertainment. Not least on the back-shelves of bookstores, fantasy continues to linger on the edges of society and acceptability, and before I, we, banish it entirely, we ought to recognize what it is, where it comes from, what it means. These days, fantasy remains more heavily plagued than ever by an association with lack of reason and distortion – even the comparatively harmless “fantastic” can still, on the authority of the Oxford English Dictionary, mean “perversely or irrationally imagined.” Yet the Latin roots of these words, long-forgotten, gave them their character and remain in the very same Dictionary. Fantasy once meant “to make visible,” with variations defined as “to imagine, have visions.” Tied in its most ancient incarnations to imagination, fantasy shares that history with foresight and prophecy. Not surprisingly, so does religion.

Historians tell us that religion was founded to explain the unexplainable, but what it truly requires is faith, because, as questioning minds soon realized, not everything has an explanation. From that point on we can only imagine. Try as it may to condemn fantasy, religion cannot escape it, because the two are inextricably linked. Each deals with the permeable boundary between what is possible and what is not. Insubstantial, indefinite thing that it is, such a boundary need never become too respected as fixed and fully factual; instead, its edges ought to be in a constant state of exploration, its substance stretched and probed for a weakness that can allow even a little more of the “impossible” into our lives. Fantasy, in all its nuances, is as fickle, capricious, and subtle as a serpent in Eden. And, whatever your opinion on the matter, it was the serpent who first taught us to doubt the absolute. It was the serpent who told us to want more. It is that hint of possibility in “visions” that makes fantasy so important.

William Blake once wrote, “What is now proved was once only imagin’d.” He had a point: human imagining – fantasizing – shapes and improves society and the way we relate to the world. The Earth is round. Buildings that scrape the sky like Babel and people flying higher than the birds are commonplace. All were once heretical, mere fantasy. Then, too, parents must have encouraged their children to abandon such foolish thoughts for more practical things. It is little wonder that imagination is so diminished by adulthood: in such an environment, few childhood dreams escape untarnished. Yet without the eye for the future derived from fantasizing, the progress that we cherish as fundamental to our reason-driven society would have ceased to exist, and, should fantasy be extinguished, will indeed do so.

Technology is the product of progress; in fact, we have come to see it as its near definition. Appropriately, our lives today are defined by the technology, both immense and awe-inspiringly small, which surrounds us. After our planes and skyscrapers ventured into the heavens, human imagination rapidly quested onto the new frontier that we created ourselves, lovingly sculpting miniature worlds from silicon, worlds that are now an integral part of our daily lives. And is not the speed, the color, the brilliantly invisible connectedness of a computer a sort of magic? That magic of new technology has always held an aspect of fascination that, like the first colonizers of a foreign land, often comes to us sheathed in the covers of a novel. Science fiction is an easy example of literature that invites the reader into uncharted possibility, but there is more to those novels as well. However absorbing are the potential innovations, still more so are the resonating moral questions that come with their use. To what extent, for example, are we truly responsible for our actions? Or what about this: Is it honorable to sacrifice the happiness of some for the happiness of many? I am never asked such questions in my day-to-day life; how could I be, trapped as I am, as we all are, by the literal? It is for such a reason that I regard you careful sidlers by us readers of fantasy with my own small amount of pity. But these questions are not limited to science fiction; they may be present any time life stretches to encompass some new concept that has thrown the clarity of reason off key so that we are right back with the incubatory root-mass. Reason, however nicely comprehendible, is never quite so interesting as that root-mass, because only the unsettled has the opportunity to change. Novels, all the more romantic for their exile, serve as the first frontier of possibility.