Phillip Pullman Essay response

“We believe different things in different ways and for different reasons” - “the rock-hard certainty of personal experience” and “the logically convincing”

“We don’t demand or require scientific proof of everything we believe, not only because it would be impossible to provide but because, in a lot of cases, it isn’t necessary or appropriate” – sometimes we believe things without any logical or scientific proof just because we wish something was true or connect to it. In order to be convincing and relatable stories don’t have to be logical or realistic. They just have to speak to someone on a personal level or provoke an emotion.

“childhood reading is more like play than like anything else. Like pretending” “When we children play at being characters we admire doing things we value, we discover in doing so areas and depths of feeling it would be hard to reach otherwise. … in acting these out, we experience them in miniature or, as it were, in safety” – stories are engaging because they let us experience things we’d never otherwise even get close to. Even sad stories have an appeal as although they lack joy they still make you feel in ways you didn’t think you would.

“By acting out stories of heroism and sacrifice… I was building patterns of behaviour and expectation into my moral understanding.”

“The way I read as an adult is a little different, because there’s a part of my reading mind now that looks with critical attention at the way the story is told” – as adults we are more critical and sceptical and thus maybe can’t immerse ourselves in stories as deeply as children would be able to. What I thought mostly when I was a child was, “I want to be in this story with them.”

“I didn’t want to stop being myself; I didn’t want to be them; I wanted to put myself into the story and enjoy things happening to me” – we don’t complete dissociate form ourselves when engaging with a story we still remain connected to our original self.

“I knew these story things, these play things, weren’t real, but that didn’t matter, because I didn’t want them to be real, I wanted them to be funny. Or delightful. Or exciting.” The main purpose of any story is to make you feel something.

- What stories, folk tales or fairy tales have you or do you enjoy believing? As a child I enjoyed believing faitytales about time travel, magicians and charcaters with superpowers because they gave me hope that there is magic in the world and maybe one day I would also have a super power like the characters in the fairytales I read.

- Which fictional characters make you feel the most you? Nowadays the fictional characters that make me feel the most me are those that I would enojoy being like/ befriending or those that I connect with despite their vices like villains with backstories that surprisingly make you emphasise with them and understand their actions. These highlight that we all have our flaws and vulnerabilities which makes the character feel more convincing and makes me feel comforted knowing that everyone is human no matter how intimidating or perfect they may appear. Nowadays old soviet movies I watched as a child make me feel the most me as they remind me of my home country and make me nostalgic reminding me of my childhood.

- Which characters have you related to and why? As a child I related to the character of the girl protagonist in the Russian movie the nutcracker: on Christmas Eve she went into a store and imagined a whole parallel universe which she then got to explore while saving the life of the nutcracker who she fell in love with. I always hoped that I could make my imagined stories come true therefore this movie always fascinated me. I also connected with Peter Pan because I wanted to be brave and fun like him and live in a land where I’d never have to grow up filled with magical beings, mermaids and pirates. Currently I connect with very different characters like criminals form my true crime podcasts because they can highlight the worst impulses every human probably experiences at some point and how easy it is to give into them. It’s interesting to compare their lives with mine and see certain similarities and consider whether I would have ended up the same had my circumstances been different.

- What a characters or stories have you denied taking joy in? I never enjoyed non-fiction books like biographies because I prefer to read and watch stories that are further away from real life and feel more like an escape. When something is so closely related to the real world it doesn’t really let you dissociate as much. I also never enjoyed horror films or horror stories, for instance in the movie IT I could never connect to the scary clown character as he seemed to lack understandable motivations and the whole movie was based around fear rather than constructing an interesting storyline which I also couldn’t focus on at all due to being too scared the whole time.

- Which stories have you kept secret? I keep my dreams secret, especially nightmares as those often revolve around scenarios in which I feel ashamed like those involving public humiliation and the realisation of my worst fears. I also keep my guilty pleasure books secret like teen fiction that I still read. These generally considered embarrassing but are oddly the stories that provide comfort as they are familiar and relate to a particular point in my life.

Library of Limbs: RESEARCH

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