Emotions are our vices and virtues. Experiencing them becomes a struggle once it feels like they are a steady stream of heavy darkness, but they also are the only things to cause your heart to race with complete excitement. Emotions are our life savers and reading novels is what helps us see this so clearly.
You feel alive. That’s what emotions do. They are the things that make us feel them so personally. We’re afraid of the black niches that come along the way, the wounds that boil into our skin as people leave, hopes die, and things don’t head the way you want. And it’s incredibly unfortunate that when people laugh or smile or frown or cry there isn’t a whoosh of emotion in their soul. They’re simply numb because they let time dull their feelings, hoping it will prevent them from experiencing future pain.
But what we have to discover is the variety of sentiments that exists in this vast world. Yes, pain is that black monster nipping at your shoelaces, trying to trip you with every step you wander forward, but he’s not the only thing under the category of feelings. Happiness festers there, so does fear, and excitement, and nervousness dabbles there also. Courage resides there, along with content, and her friends pride and graciousness. Love, of course, is there too.
And books help illuminate all these sentiments. Anguish gnaws into our souls, in our lives that we think look so bleak and uninviting but books can change all of that. They have the ubiquitous power to inspire, to think, and most of all, to feel.
Of course, growing up, we’re told that we have to read, that it’s good for us, blah blah blah. But no one ever really explains why. Reading helps develop your reading skills, which everybody needs in order to succeed in whatever they pursue. However, reading has other benefits.
Scientifically, reading fiction novels helps kids develop empathy, according to The Guardian, since it teaches them to relate their lives to other characters going through conflicts in books. Fiction novels also help children learn what normal social interaction is and how to react to it.
Also, according to a study done by psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, at the New School for Social Research in New York, when people read fiction that is more “writerly” (literature that authors write that leave gaps in the text), it provide scenes where the reader has to fill in parts of the situation. This is what makes people think while reading, since it becomes an active activity. It instills social skills and a mind that begins to blossom with imagination since the more someone reads, the more they’re exposed to new situations, which, in turn, provide them with the skills to develop their own scenes.
But books also provide a bigger support for us as we grow older, if we allow it: escape. Since we’re spoon-fed on reading and fairy tales since the day we are born, it’s no wonder we turn back to them when we’re searching for some comfort away from the needles of the real world.
Books are the best way to completely saturate ourselves away from our lives and into new ones. They challenge us to think, to get inside other people’s heads. We read lines of text that are the lives of characters that we can easily become attached to. We think through their situations, we try to figure out what will come next, and we usually find ourselves pondering about the similarities to what’s going on in both of your lives.
According to Lucy Mangan, an author and columnist writer for a variety of news publications, books are utterly appealing and the perfect means to escape because they’re a way for us not to feel so alone and lost and hurt in this raw reality.
Senior Lina Park also feels the poignant escape books provide: “[Reading] takes me into a whole new world, like if you know what I mean. It’s like looking into someone else’s life and it allows me to get away from my life for a while also.”
The way characters react and think are the same way we do. The only thing that changes is the surface in books. Conflicts are different, character names change, the locations vary, but the feelings remain the same; the core never changes. Whether it’s a post-apocalyptic thriller or a tragic love novel, we can still relate to the feelings the character feels because that’s what we all have in common: emotions.
We find comfort in things we know. And novels highlight our situations, they relate to us because part of us is in all of them. Yes, we relate to the conflicts that happen, but the emotions are what capture us. I’ve never been captured by a stalker and stuck in the middle of the desert in Australia with a strange man, unable to contact anyone. But I still remember Stolen after reading it a year ago because the author painted those emotions of utter desperation and a wrecked hope along with the alert she possessed so well that I remember it. I recall my heart shaking with her, my mouth wanting to scream like hers, both of us in frustration, both of us feeling the same blubbering melancholy. We find ourselves beneath the ink and it’s impossible to pull away from the pull books obtain once you see your own heart beating in those pages.
These emotions are what make us all able to bond and relate to one another, what makes us so different from any other species. This is why we must keep them alive, suckle on whatever they want to provide us. And novels are the only safe place where we can experiment with our emotions, where we can truly let our guard fall and let these feelings claw and lunge and whisper at us in any way they please because they are fixed. Books end, even if your emotions for them don’t. They’re so safe since once the last page is read, that world is closed, unlike the real world. Emotions crease in our skin in our realities, and we’re scared they’ll age us too much before we’re ready.
Books are the middle ground between feeling nothing and only feeling pain. They color in our hearts with colors the real world can never bare so proudly raw. They chisel in pieces of our hearts that are hard to find out in the grayness of our confusing realities. They demonstrate the collisions of situations that would be too agonizing to let ourselves feel in our lives.
We have to find the courage to let this array of mixed emotions crown our hearts with every flicker of feeling they’re willing to give. We have to grow confident with ourselves, knowing that we’ll be able to get through the black midnights because there’s always another morning that will roll around and bask us in a new aroma of warm emotions. Let books paint the way for emotions; you’ll never lose the way, since there’s always new words to comfort your fractured heart once the world feels a little too heavy.
