The Day Circus

I like writing fiction but the actual question that bothers me is, what’s the point? I read very often and I tried to search the most aesthetic and sensory books and one of the recommendations was The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I just couldn’t read it, it felt bland to me. I realise that since so many have positively commented about the novel, the issue might not be with novel but me, that I have become so numb that I couldn’t really get the feelings that I had anticipated from the novel. Surprisingly enough, I read Dracula again recently and I was not only able to feel the tension in the novel but also imagine, as vividly as it is could be possible in the present political scenario of my region. I want to give The Night circus another try though. I have realised the literature is dead and has become redundant. I only write because I enjoy writing and I read because I enjoy reading. A recent development in my reading habits is that I can’t trust any writer beyond the 1950s. It feels to me that 1950s were the last days when authentic writing was present, and I really want to be so wrong but whatever I come across, makes me feel that this is true, a major exception to this are the comics and children’s magazines of the 90s in India and a few other exceptions, like the novel Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, or The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. I guess any writer who has been writing while deluded about the true reality of the world but is authentic to his or her experiences or imagination writes authentic literature, but that authentic literature stops to matter, even if they are their real experiences when one realises that we have been living in perpetual slavery since quite some time and writings of people are just expressions of their personal delusions. When the reality of absolute slavery and the boot of extreme totalitarianism is on your face, it becomes extremely hard to imagine and make-believe. My line of thought may seem extreme but I guess it has to do with my personal belief of taking the bottom-line as the true reality. I mean if you don’t even own your own body and mind, ideas of freedom and independence and self-expression are done for. All the books can do now is make you feel how you want to feel and it then becomes their sole purpose. I write because I like writing, but if my writing had to have a purpose it would be two-fold, exposing the people to truth and making them feel and looking at the state of the world of today, making them feel good and warm. The worst part of today’s reality is that totalitarianism and freedom can be customised, like I may live in extreme totalitarianism but another person might be enjoying complete or even excessive freedom, but the issue is that the freedom of the person living in complete freedom can be curtailed any day and the things that he did while he was free and which were normal when he was free could be used against him during the totalitarianism and this is what I meant when I said that I consider the bottom line to be the actual truth.