UFO in Kushiro (Slogtastically Late)

When trying to address the question of why we tell and read stories in which bad things happen, particularly in the lens of the Murakami story, I keep thinking back to the line in the middle when Shimao says to Komura: "No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself."  The fears and terrors which we simulate through literature are in fact idealizations of the self, fears and terrors actualized by the text through the self.  It is as though to garner the experience (and complexities, and thrills) that come from the bad things that happen, yet to avoid the risks, we crave stories in which the reader-self (which we cannot escape) reconstructs even the harshest realities.

We read stories in which bad things happen in part, generally, so the self learns.  The self cannot escape its own self-contained optimism, its sense that things will get better, in which case, it would be useful to learn from bad experience.  I think this is a long term goal for the self, though, and that the reader-self does not always see it this way so directly at first.  At first, we may read literature in which bad things happen, not necessarily out of schadenfreude or ill humor, but because there is a capacity to wonder at the vastness of ill fate that is possible for us.  There is a capacity to wonder at the vastness of the pain and suffering we find the capacity to nearly inflict on ourselves, through the act of reading alone.

This past fall, Professor Landy co-taught a course called Literature and the Brain, in which he introduced a variety of questions, one among them, which we read books that "do not make us happy." Aside from the "I must make my way through this text because ultimately, somehow, it will make me a better person" attitude, which he claimed to be the attitude for reading in general, Landy claimed that we read about bad things also because the act of imagining things that (hopefully) don't usually cross our thoughts activates parts of the brain that often lie in disuse, and the neurotransmitters that travel abundantly after this unexpected activation causes a kind of pleasant sensation, even a slight activation of dopamine receptors.  This is a product of vivid fantasy-making anyway.  "We need illusions to make us happy," Landy said, according to my notes from the class.  Indeed, such happiness breathes only within the stretches, from outskirt to outskirt, of the self.