The Quiet Revolution Revisited - More Musings On Reading With A Possible Segue Into the Reductionism Of History

It perhaps is one of the great ironies of modern culture that the physicality of a book would tap into a person's extraverted desire to be motivated by something objective, only then to find that same person to be quickly sucked into a world that is intraverted, imaginal and oftentimes even spiritual.
The book sits on the shelf, with a beautiful frontispiece and handsome dustjacket, enticing you with the introduction, or preface or bibliography. This, still then, is the outer experience of the book. But then perhaps you read further, maybe a paragraph, perhaps a chapter, and suddenly you are standing in second century Alexandria, ensconced in the climate of the Ptolemies, and find yourself thrown into a world where there are only seven planets in the solar system, each with a corresponding archon who exercises menacing dominance over your soul. You take a freefall from an enlightened, democratic society whose penultimate virtue is Liberty, and suddenly find yourself bound in the bonds of Fate, living on a mysterious planet which is encircled by the mighty ancient ocean, where Atlantis lies just beyond the pillars of Hercules.
Perhaps you read a history book thinking you will find good, solid, truths and then begin thinking 'wait a minute, if historians were writing of the twentyfirst century, they would write of wars and scientific progress and the general barbaric lack of human rights throughout much of the world, yet I've never fought anyone, and I don't know how to fully operate my cell phone, and I treat my neighbor as I would choose to be treated'. In otherwords, you would discover that History does not tell your story, your truth, your experience, but only emphasizes those events that are incongruous with the plain, the normal, and yes at times, the boring and always everyday.
Then you would realize, hey, that's how History has always been written. It's a tale of a few outstanding folks who lived more raucous lives than I. Perhaps you would then move on to the notion that History reduces the experience of millions of people into the lives of a few winners, and has at least as many blindspots as it has written words.
This then, would be the first hint that words lie. They may tell a white lie, but they lie all the same, and you begin to wonder, 'have I just learned the tales of madmen told by madmen'? You may wonder why History's great movements were not declared beforehand as in 'And now comes the Dark Ages', or 'I now am speaking to you from the Renaissance', or 'and now comes the beheading of kings and queens and the onslaught of the decentralized, unorderly and chaotic rule of the free citizen'. One begins to wonder, did these people, were they aware, of what times they were living in?
And History is not the only reductionism operating in Literature. Do not the Universal Archetypes, the Great Mother, the Wounded Leader, The Shadow, The Father, The Child, collapse into so many personalities of dreamed up characters? Abstract, objective universal images are squeezed into concrete, subjective and particular personalities.
Where does all this Magic, this heretical maneuvering and reconstructing of Reality come from? These authors are Shamans who have experienced altered states of consciousness, where the character is not just shaped by a false environenment, but the Self is shaped by the oceanic, the unconscious! When you get sucked in to a good story, you are living the life of fictional characters, experiencing the feeling of straw men and fearing the fears of nonentities. Again, whence this Magic?
These are just a few of the musings I have discovered in myself as I have rediscovered the textual world through my renewed grand tour of World Literature. I have encountered gnomes, sylphs, salamanders and undines, countless mythological gods and heroes, not a few and sundry quests and battles, and the supposed laconic unfolding of those who have gone before me. Where I have sought answers, I have just developed more questions that I now realize may never be completely and neatly answered. Just the circularity of it shows reading is something infinite, eternal and flowing. You realize you've been encountering the same Hero, only with different names in different settings, and though you should be outraged, you actually feel enriched!
Literature truly wraps you and folds you into a different world where dreams are just as valid and substantial as cement bricks. Intuition is activated by foreshadowing in a good novel, and even though you know who the bad guy is, you still read on to confirm what you already know. In short, Literature offers a counter-universe where new worlds are experienced, new beings are come into Reality, and a flight of fancy may serve just as well as the most cogent argument.
Literature, the written word, is keeping Magic alive, in my view. It flattens out mountainous experiences and compresses eons of wisdom into a few verses of Pindar. Literature provides secular transcendence, and is consequently anti clerical and definitely unorganized. Literature provides an alternate route to Reality that is not couched in sound bytes and commercials.
What is there not to like about any of this?