Here’s something I wrote the other night in response to a post at caterina.net. I share it now because I can and because I am, in fact, this desperate for original content that doesn’t involve the words Hot Pocket:
We toss around this word “escapism” like it’s a terrible thing, as if should be ashamed of it, as if we who read do so for more noble reasons. But the truth is, escpaism is good for the spirit. How can you actively involve yourself in any artform if you don’t escape into it? When you read a work of fiction, you’ve engaged yourself in a world that doesn’t exist; you become involved with people who have, and will, never live. From Geoffrey Chaucer to John Grisham, when you read, you escape into a lie. There’s plenty of truth within that lie — truth about the world and how others see it, truth about yourself — but let’s be honest: it’s a lie all the same.
“To me,” says author Michael Chabon, “Moby-Dick is escapism….I’m not going to read that book or any book if it doesn’t completely lift me up out of my ordinary, mundane existence and transport me to another world, to another place, to another time, even if it’s something as apparently subtle as transporting me into the consciousness of another human being….I think only really good works of art are capable of doing that.”
And there are really good works of art on television. Let’s not be snobs about it. It isn’t television that’s the problem; it’s passively watching television. That’s what separates the world of book lovers from the world of television watchers. People love books because those books become a part of themselves. Most people who watch television are not actively involved in the process, and if you’re not actively involved in art, then it isn’t art. It’s just something pretty to look at while you disengage your brain.
I watch television to be entertained and informed, to see a world outside myself through other people’s eyes, and that’s the same reason I read. To escape. There’s a lot of bad television, believe me, and there are a lot of bad books, and you are under no obligation to seek out either simply to remain culturally cognizant. But to dismiss television simply because it’s popular, because it is enjoyed not by the elite but by many…well, isn’t that sort of the same thing as dismissing books because they are enjoyed by an elite, because it’s not cool to know who Fortinbras is?
Then again, it’s late, I’m tired, and I’m not convinced I’m being as clear as I’d like to be. And to be perfectly honest, I only knew what “shibboleth” meant because I heard it on an episode of The West Wing. What do I know?
