195
“You adulterate the truth as you write. There isn’t any pretense that you try to arrive at the literal truth. And the only consolation when you confess this flaw is that you are seeking to arrive at poetic truth, which can be reached only through fabrication, imagination, stylization. What I’m striving for is authenticity; none of it is real” (p66).
Reality is immensely complex. Condensing the real world into phrases made up of words with specific definitions is implausible. The best an author can do is choose an angle of reality and observe, contaminating it with the writers own inevitably opinionated apprehensions, a processed product under the influence of his or her previous experiences. This in turn creates another type of truth, something that is at least true for the author, and that may also be potentially true for the reader, maybe in a different sense, but that is also valuable. All an author’s work has to be is honest.
255, 256, (p.86)
“Facts now seem important”
“Facts have gravitas”
Because we believe that if we get our information from what is true, from what is real, it will be of more use to us in life. That may be true when it comes to science and the like, (ex: how to tell wind speed), but not necessarily so for the more philosophical inquiries.
241
“The body gets used to a drug and needs a stronger dose in order to experience the thrill. An illusion of reality – the idea that something really happened – is providing us with that thrill right now. We’ve riveted by the (seeming) rawness of something that appears direct from the source, or at least less worked over than a polished mass-media production” (p82).
Shields is right. We really are reality-hungry. Hollywood has exploited the boundaries of the impossible. Before it was the shark, then the two headed shark, then they gave the bicephalous shark wings. Now, the audience wants to find the four leaved clover, the spectacular exception in ordinary life.
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