Life imitates Fiction

People tell us that movie makes us love life more than we loved it before; that it reveals its secrets to us; and that we see things in it that had escaped our observation.
The more we enjoy the movies, the less we care for reality.
What show really reveals to us is life's lack of design, its curious crudities, its extraordinary monotony, its absolutely unfinished condition. Reality has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.
As for the infinite variety of life, that is a pure myth.
It is not to be found in reality itself.
It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at it.
Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects.

If reality had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air.
In a house we all feel of the proper proportions.
Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.
Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal.
One's individuality absolutely leaves one.
And then reality is so indifferent, so unappreciative.
Nothing is more evident than that reality hates Mind.
Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease.
Fortunately thought is not catching.
Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our stupidity.
I only hope we shall be able to keep this great historic bulwark of our happiness for many years to come; but I am afraid that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching - that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to.


Paradox though it may seem - and paradoxes are always dangerous things - it is none the less true that Life imitates movies far more than movies imitates life.
A great director invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.
As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature.
The most obvious and the vulgarest form in which this is shown is in the case of the silly boys who, after reading the adventures of somebody imitate him.
This interesting phenomenon, is usually attributed to the influence of literature on the imagination.
But this is a mistake.
The imagination is essentially creative, and always seeks for a new form.
The boy-whatever is simply the inevitable result of life's imitative instinct.
He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life.
Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it.
The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.
The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product.
He was invented by Tourgenieff, and completed by Dostoieffski.

Personal experience is a most vicious and limited circle.
All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Show far more than Show imitates Life, and I feel sure that if you think seriously about it you will find that it is true.

Life holds the mirror up to Show, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction. Scientifically speaking, the basis of life - the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it - is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained. Life seizes on them and uses them, even if they be to it own hurt. Young men have committed suicide because somebody in the fiction did so, have died by their own hand because by his own hand Werther died. Think of what we owe to the imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of Caesar.

Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows?
To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge?


Rove, however, is more than a political sharpie with a bulging bag of dirty tricks. His campaign shenanigans — past and future — go to the heart of what this election is about.

Nothing else than the mirror of our life: a reality trying to imitate fiction..


Liberally taken from Oscar Wilde