How reading fiction can make us kinder towards ourselves and others
We live in the era of distraction. With our consumption limited only by the speed at which we can scroll through our feeds, today’s trends are shorter-lived than ever before[1]. This is a time when silence is rare and thinking deep costs more effort the more sophisticated our gadgets become. Taking a moment to detach and think sometimes feels like a superhuman feat. Let’s nevertheless try to take a moment to consider the astounding impact this technology has had on us. We have become so good at distracting ourselves that our technology has made us more distractible[2]. With ever shorter attention spans, we long for ever more perfect distraction. That’s as vicious a vicious cycle as there ever was. The ever more effective platforms of distraction thrive on novelty. They are literally modelled on the slot machines of Las Vegas[3]. A new meme, a new influencer, a new diet, the latest outrage- for a moment they are all there is and then they disappear. We have never had so many ways of spending our time, and yet who really thinks that we have become better at using it? This constant distraction leaves us unprepared to confront that which we are escaping from: the reality of our relationships with others and ourselves. By always keeping an eye on our screens, we lose touch with that reality, but never quite manage to make it disappear. Whenever our phones’ batteries run out and no sockets are in sight, we are terrified of the depths that we have left unexplored- and even mighty Tic Toc cannot change that.
Life is difficult, and always has been. Far from being a complaint, it is a fundamental fact. People, no matter how smart and no matter how wealthy, are struggling through life, never quite sure what tomorrow might bring. We are contradictory at our very core. On some days, we wake up and everything seems to glow with positive energy. For no obvious reason, other days feel like they’re predestined to devolve into psychological torture. What’s more, our behaviour doesn’t just seem to depend on the weather or on the time of the day. It also appears to be influenced by the people we are surrounded by. To our colleagues and to our relatives, we might appear to have different, maybe even incompatible personalities[4]. Your hard-headed disciplinarian boss might turn out to also be the affectionate son of a sick mother. Perfect consistency exists only in works of fiction. We rarely stop to think about this, and whenever we do, it usually seems to make little sense, and ends up scaring us. However, take an honest look at yourself, and you will recognize those contradictions within you. It is only too understandable to hide that mess away from others. Even if you tried to explain it, would anyone understand? Instead, we put on our personas and give our best to look straightforward and predictable.
That’s certainly useful to an extent- after all, a society composed of unpredictable individuals seems unlikely to survive for long. However, we know that our behaviour shapes our identity[5]. Walking around all day acting like we’ve got everything figured out, staying busy and distracting ourselves not just means we avoid grappling with that messiness inside, it also makes us forget that everyone else is walking around with a persona, too. We risk becoming our persona, because our world makes it so tantalizingly easy to never take our masks off. Convinced that we know others and ourselves, we judge others and ourselves harshly. Life stories are fed through a kind of meatgrinder and are reduced to records of likes and dislikes, tweets and posts. Intentions become clear, characters shallow. The world of Instagram is a stage[6], and we play our assigned role even in between selfies. In making our lives conform to this second-rate caricature of life we risk missing out on all that is most beautiful about it.
It is that process of grappling with our deep ambiguity, that results in the most sublime art. Michelangelo’s Pieta, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Wagner’s Ring- they all speak to us so powerfully because they confront the paradox at our core head on. Their world is ambiguous and confusing. It is the world we recognize in ourselves and that we live in every day. Good fiction similarly dares us to look beyond the superficial. Tolstoy’s War and Peace[7] guides us through that ambiguity like no other work of fiction I’ve read so far. It comes to life through characters so glaringly human that readers cannot help but recognise themselves in them. The tension between harmless appearances and the hidden world runs through and leaves its mark on every chapter. The world of the St Petersburg salons with its superficial small talk, manufactured outrage and virtue signalling, is eerily familiar to anyone caught up in the 24-hour news cycle. Where the Petersburg salons functioned as welcome opportunities for harmless distraction, “Keeping up with the Kardashians” and the latest shitstorm on Twitter are their supercharged offspring. Just like Anna Pavlovna’s salon was governed by an implicit code of etiquette, preventing anyone from saying something actually meaningful, so our modern salons are designed for maximal Oxytocin release. Thoughtfulness and moderation, on the other hand, are discouraged by their very business models. By avoiding deep conversations and living in our portable handheld salons, we risk never connecting with others in any meaningful way.
We only wonder if other people might not really be the well-polished, easy to understand personas they appear to be, when we face that ambiguity inside ourselves. Like Tolstoy’s characters, we sometimes feel like we’re adrift in an ocean, sometimes catching sight of the shore only to be swept under the next instant. We know how the never-ending attempt to make out a purpose can be exhilarating one day and depressing the next. What wouldn’t we give for a reliable compass to show us the way through it all? All these are quintessentially human experiences. In a way, they define what it means to live. There is no escaping them. Not in any salon, and not in any feed. Sooner or later, again and again, they catch up with all of us. War and Peace is not the key to a life free from these experiences. It is, however, a powerful reminder that we are not alone.
Tolstoy’s characters experience all the highs and suffer through all the lows, they make horrible mistakes and do tremendous good. Along the way, they despair, find hope, love and loathe. Their plans and predictions rarely come true, and although they mature, they remain always torn, always human. It feels like the novel, by giving us insight into these lives, asks us to not be afraid of that uncertainty, that ambiguity that will never leave us. Instead, by helping us accept it within ourselves and others, it makes us kinder towards both ourselves and others. After all, we are all just trying to stay afloat in that same ocean.
This sense of solace that War and Peace leaves us with might explain why the book seems to find its way to readers when they most need it. When I told my grandfather a few weeks ago that I was reading the novel, he told me that he read it twice over as a young officer during the darkest days of the Cypriot Civil War. Wherever you are now, if you recognise any of the experiences I described, set aside time for yourself, think deeply, don’t be afraid of meaningful conversations- and read War and Peace.
[1] https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-04/tuod-aoi041119.php
[2] It also poses a plethora of other dangers: https://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/faculty-research/more-social-media-regulation
[3] As detailed by Natasha Dow Schüll in “Addiction by Design”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_by_Design
[4] There is, for example, research indicating that just using a different language can impact our “major five” personality traits: http://www.utpsyc.org/Nairan/research/bilingual.pdf
[5] Our habits seem to have a profound influence on our identities. Successfully adopting a habit can go a long way towards shifting one’s self-perception: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01504/full
[6] To paraphrase Shakespeare: As You Like It Act 3 Scene 7
[7] A book described by the author himself as “not a novel, even less a poem and still less an historical chronicle”, but in fact containing elements of all three.
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