- What is fantasy for? ➶
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Katherine Rundell, writing in the London Review of Books:
What is fantasy for? You do not suddenly start needing philosophy on your eighteenth birthday: you have always needed it. Fantasy is philosophy’s more gorgeously painted cousin. You can’t just tell a child a blunt fact about the human heart and expect them to believe you. That’s not how it works. You can’t scribble on a Post-it note for a 12-year-old: your strangeness is worth keeping, or your love will matter. You need to show it. And fantasy, with its limitless scope, gives us a way of offering longhand proof for otherwise inarticulable ideas: endurance and hatred and regret, and power and passion and death. As Tolkien said, in an interview in 1968, ‘human stories are practically always about one thing, aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death.’
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Possibly Related:
- Confessions of a disillusioned scientist
- Two thousand and twenty-four
- Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?
- Two thousand and twenty-three
- Life lessons from 50 years of work
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