A very special guided tour

It is often said that the communication is one of the most characteristically human abilities, even if many other animal (and plant) species also participates in communications in one way or another: many mating rituals are nothing but communication acts where the courting males try to convey to the choosing females how suitable they are for producing abundant and healthy offspring; the colors of many poisonous animals warn potential predators of the upset belly they can get if they pick the wrong dish for lunch; flowers are visual and chemical signals for the insects to land on. And the examples are endless, because every being, just by existing in the world, produce signals that others can interpret and, conversely, receive other stimuli from their surroundings.

One aspect that is not unique to humans but is indeed restricted to the most evolved of mammals is symbolic communication, our ability to pick a random sign (like a word or a drawing) and agree to associated with a certain meaning. It is not like we are the only ones to use representation (let us just think of the flight patterns of the bees) but the fact that we can choose how to represent each meaning as opposed to the instinctive representation that insects enact. And this freedom of representation is the root for the variety of human languages that we have, because each ethnic group has, over the decades and centuries, chosen or inherited new symbols for the realities (or even the ideas) that they had not named yet.

Photo: Harco Rutgers

This ability to share (the word communication contains the Latin root for "common") is beautifully depicted in a conversation, where one of the speakers provides a glimpse into their mind by expressing an idea that the listeners ingest and consolidate with their own, only to provide a brief view of the result when they respond. It is almost like a game of cards, with the difference that each card is being printed in real time as a snapshot of a small portion of the speaker's mind. In fact, it is often the case (e.g. in political debates) that a conversation turns into two parallel monologues when the speakers come to the conversation with a set of pre-printed cards that they play as they see fit, but not allowing the ideas of the counterpart to affect their own.

But there is a very special form of communication that can be much richer and provide a deeper understanding of someone else's mind: stories. Contrary to plain dialogues, stories provide insight into a host of the writer's ideas and that in a particular order. When the story is properly structured it is easy to see how one idea leads to the next, to understand the analysis of the causes, to follow the prediction of the consequences and to observe the evolution of the ideas as the narration evolves. More surprisingly yet is that the experience requires us to willingly give up the control over the direction and the timing of the story: we cannot choose where the story goes and we cannot change how things happen, we just have to follow them as they develop and enjoy the ride. It would be tempting to compare it with a roller-coaster or a carnival ride, because once you get started the only way out is ahead and the speed is set, but stories do not always happen in one go from start to finish so I will use the metaphor of a guided tour.

Reading a book (or watching a movie) is, in many aspects, like taking a vacation. It not only allows us to get away from ourselves, as I mentioned in another post, but it also shares other particularities. In both cases, sometimes they are in planning for a long time (like your long-awaited trip to Patagonia or the yet-to-be-published sixth book of A Song of Ice and Fire) and sometimes you just run into them (like the last-minute deal from your travel agent or a book you find at the train station). Also in both cases there can be huge variations in duration and cost, and the longest ones are not necessarily the most enjoyable. They both expect you to follow a certain itinerary, with predetermined stops in certain locations, and also omissions that can be painful but are necessary to reach the end in time and budget. The main difference is that, while a vacation happens in the real world, a story is a guided tour inside the mind of the author. This also explains why it is not uncommon that, after we have read a story by an author and peered into their mind, we look forward the next one by the same author, like making a trip to Costa Rica and, as soon as you are back home, starting to planning the next one just to a different destination in the same area.

Some years ago I enjoy very much the terribly unsettling story of "Gone Girl", the 2012 novel by American writer Gillian Flynn, which I got in a bundled edition alongside her two previous novels "Sharp Objects" (2006) and "Dark Places" (2009), but after I finished the third one I did not feel very inclined to read the first two, who deal respectively with a serial killer and with satanic rituals. Still, a couple of weeks ago I was looking for something to read that was not as hard-core as the next book of "The Expanse", so I decided to give it a try and I can only see that I was immediately captivated by the narration. So now I am again (on and off) visiting the wonderfully scary nooks and crannies of Flynn's mind in a very special guided tour that has already provided a lot of fun and still holds a lot of promise. I hope you find a wonderful book too. Have a nice evening.