Sometimes it’s hard to get into a story, other times it’s incredibly hard to stay in one. Either way, people have been drawn to these little windows into someone else’s life. It is very interesting how much we can learn by seeing through the eyes of another, although it could be added that one is not fully mature until he has gone through everything and has tasted all the fruits of Mother Earth. In fact, the stories could be seen as a sort of third-degree encounter with a possible YOU going through things that YOU could, would, or should go through. Walk the plank for you, love for you, die for you… You are somewhere in a safe, detached position, from where you can observe, learn and feel without being touched. From here, you are bound to grow to a new level of understanding, some would argue. It’s like all those generals who plan and direct battles from their safe haven sipping their coffee and/or tea, but there is one detail that separates you from them: you are a mere spectator; you watch the action as it unfolds, but you cannot interfere. Or you can?
Michael Ende has shown that you can actually go into a story and change it, even save it. Bastian’s story and his adventure has traveled all over the world. Some of us grew up with the movie, not even knowing that it was actually inspired by a book, a common mistake in a screen-oriented society. Anyway, we have to understand the importance of this fact: it is a movie inspired by a book about a book that is not only 3D, but fully interactive and even more so! The characters interact and travel in and out of the story, the reader becomes a character as soon as he realizes that he holds the key to these, let’s call it, parallel universes. And this fictitious world framed in another equally fictitious universe is devoured by a black hole, which is Nothing. And here’s the problem: Fantasy and the real world depend on each other to exist. Stories cannot exist without people learning about them and spreading them further, and people cannot evolve as complex beings without these little games of imagination.
In fact, the stories are games of imagination. To tell a story you must first see it yourself, become the conductor of an orchestra of words and possibilities. Although the listener is not supposed to have an active position (externally), he has a very important role in the process: the listener must direct his own movie, imagining what is being told, creating possible scenarios, maybe even becoming attached to one or more characters of the narrative. You have to step outside of yourself to really hear a story. You can become one of the characters, you can go into the story as yourself (see The Neverending Story, again), you can alter that universe any way you want, you are the God of your own world. Children often use this process when playing. They have this incredible ability to become a better (fantastic?) version of themselves, they can and will let their imagination flow, there are no limits, there is no adult to tell them that there is no Santa Claus, they travel with Santa in his death. , even though they seem to be in his room playing. Nobody can say that they live in a lie, for them the magical world of their minds is as real as the normal life they lead with their family, friends, etc.
That is why stories are preferred by children and denied by adults as childish, immature, unreal. But here we can easily see a big mistake in making these claims: the stories are not just “Once upon a time…” tales with princes fighting dragons and princesses trapped in ivory towers. We watch movies, read books, even do drills on various occasions. And we are not children. This paradox would hurt the feelings of many, but at the same time, there is no paradox. The apparent contradiction is itself a fiction created by adults who wanted to justify their actions as mature and reasonable. It is one more way of neutralizing the so-called feminine element that threatened the path of the enlightened man. I’m not trying to make a feminist argument, but this essay somehow leads to a conclusion that also includes such a statement. Neither am I affirming that the stories are feminine, nor that they are masculine. They are merely irrational and deeply linked to our subconscious, some would say. I can’t say I don’t agree, but the problem is much more complicated. It would be like trying to reduce String Theory to a Newtonian point of view. It makes no sense to deny the bad image that “childish” elements have in our society, but it also makes no sense to deny that they cannot be erased.
That’s what Michael Ende tries to tell us in Neverending Story. A world without imagination can very well be devoured by Nothing, like a spider leaves the shell of its prey, but the prey died a long time ago… We must not forget to believe and imagine, it is in our own nature as human beings that let the mind fly and the soul emerge in Fantasia. The world is real, the stories are real if we want them to be.