I've just seen Stranger than Fiction. And it dawned to me again, the irreparable and constantly forgotten inconsistency between life and literature. Or film. Or music videos. Or commercials, of all the genres which dispose with the means of presenting everyday life, ergo they pretend they do. And I reminisced on my taxi driver, both the one I met and the one I created, his life and his story.
As part of a novel, a character who, for his old age becomes full (leisure) time engaged in picking up unaware hitch-hikers, for the sake of a once had job, which was invented for solitary and hurried people, making him also solitary but at last with all the time on his hands, but not being able to spend it... - as a character, his life seams greatly open to symbolic interpretations on the condition of modern times and life in general. As for a real life person, this seams more likely an unfortunate course of events, to lead to an unfortunate course of life. The difference, of course, being: deliberateness. While a character, by definition, has a purpose in a novel (film etc.) in this case, making the readers realize the futility of such a life; for a living person, such realization hardly ever occurs. There exists, no question about it, a type of narrative which can be put over a human life to give intention to it, and for the European culture it's Christianity which is often (mistakenly) read as the easy way out of responsibility over one's life and purposefulness ("accepting" it that whatever happens it must be for better, but at least occurring with our Lord's consent). On our case, however, not even this pretence can be pulled off.
We have to realize that we live in a world, where, as I quoted in an earlier post, our means of socialization have greatly diminished. A person with an average job and personality, as part of the western civilization, has every possibility of ending up alone at their old ages. We simply miss the common places (this expression doesn't have a double meaning for no good reason) where people can meet, gather around and be together. Of course, we do have new ones, virtual rooms where time and spacial differences disappear and we get united by our common interests no matter age, gender, race or other stereotypical identity-setter, but in their physical reality, meeting new people just doesn't happen any more.
In an age when, as Jókai's naively visionary but in some parts painfully accurate science fiction novel stated, running around for our personal business without having the time to get to know out interlocutor has become our basic survival instinct, or because of the apparently increased mobility and simplicity in making new contacts naturally given spacial and familiar relationships get torn apart without a second thought - deliberateness gets a new importance. Immanuel Kant thought that religion and lack of education made people remain immature, (in Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?) but after two hundred years, taking one's faith in one's own hand is still a challenge - our taxi driver's story could have this elevated and outlying interpretation.
So, as a literary character, he would be a symbol of one of the aspects of a postmodern(?) way of life, as a blog entry he's just an interesting guy in a new event. But taking control means also deciding on the source of our inspiration and lessons, even if we can't wait until we start hearing a narrator voice speaking about our lives (getting back to our previous subject, deliberateness in Stranger than Fiction - for those who just didn't get it).
As part of a novel, a character who, for his old age becomes full (leisure) time engaged in picking up unaware hitch-hikers, for the sake of a once had job, which was invented for solitary and hurried people, making him also solitary but at last with all the time on his hands, but not being able to spend it... - as a character, his life seams greatly open to symbolic interpretations on the condition of modern times and life in general. As for a real life person, this seams more likely an unfortunate course of events, to lead to an unfortunate course of life. The difference, of course, being: deliberateness. While a character, by definition, has a purpose in a novel (film etc.) in this case, making the readers realize the futility of such a life; for a living person, such realization hardly ever occurs. There exists, no question about it, a type of narrative which can be put over a human life to give intention to it, and for the European culture it's Christianity which is often (mistakenly) read as the easy way out of responsibility over one's life and purposefulness ("accepting" it that whatever happens it must be for better, but at least occurring with our Lord's consent). On our case, however, not even this pretence can be pulled off.
We have to realize that we live in a world, where, as I quoted in an earlier post, our means of socialization have greatly diminished. A person with an average job and personality, as part of the western civilization, has every possibility of ending up alone at their old ages. We simply miss the common places (this expression doesn't have a double meaning for no good reason) where people can meet, gather around and be together. Of course, we do have new ones, virtual rooms where time and spacial differences disappear and we get united by our common interests no matter age, gender, race or other stereotypical identity-setter, but in their physical reality, meeting new people just doesn't happen any more.
In an age when, as Jókai's naively visionary but in some parts painfully accurate science fiction novel stated, running around for our personal business without having the time to get to know out interlocutor has become our basic survival instinct, or because of the apparently increased mobility and simplicity in making new contacts naturally given spacial and familiar relationships get torn apart without a second thought - deliberateness gets a new importance. Immanuel Kant thought that religion and lack of education made people remain immature, (in Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?) but after two hundred years, taking one's faith in one's own hand is still a challenge - our taxi driver's story could have this elevated and outlying interpretation.
So, as a literary character, he would be a symbol of one of the aspects of a postmodern(?) way of life, as a blog entry he's just an interesting guy in a new event. But taking control means also deciding on the source of our inspiration and lessons, even if we can't wait until we start hearing a narrator voice speaking about our lives (getting back to our previous subject, deliberateness in Stranger than Fiction - for those who just didn't get it).
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