July 2, 2008 11.06 p.m., Baltimore

What if life was a fairy tale? With magic books and human changing into birds. With beautiful princesses and kings and magic ointments that cure every wound. Where things are in black and white and good and evil are clearly demarcated. Where you always know what is the right thing to do and there are not many moments of doubt. But life has to be this collection of moments when most things are not clear, there’s no right and wrong and it’s just choices, some good ones which you can stand by and some that you kick your feet later for having made.

It’s also this endless cycle, a routine of activities to earn a living: though when I see the people around me I can’t call what they do as living. They do things to pass the time and are quite delusional to think what they do is of any significance to anyone, including themselves. They have careers, families, hobbies, aspirations, the works or they think they do. It’s perhaps more important to think certain things exist when they really do not. In other words, delusion is real. It’s like the monsters in the shadows: if you think they exist (which I did), they sure do.

I’m reading a book of Italian Folktales, select and retold by Italo Calvino. I love reading Calvino’s work for the sheer beauty of his language, even though I’ve only read them as translations, so I wonder how moving the original Italian may be. So when I was in Amherst’s Jones library and I saw this book on the catalog, I promptly checked it out. The book contains an introduction by the author describing why he chose to do the book and in it he goes on to declare that folktales are real. In his opinion they offer a general explanation of life “preserved in the slow ripening of rustic consciousness”; folktales are catalogs of the potential destinies of men and women. It’s true that folktales are more often than not just allegories for real life and life’s challenges and triumphs but the simplicity of the tale is so far removed from real life that it is hard to apply the folktale formula to it, at times. Or maybe life really is actually simple and we just complicate it needlessly, to make it worthwhile maybe. There are way to many “maybe”s in the previous sentence.

Whether or not folktales are about life and human vicissitudes, I immensely enjoy escaping into a world of fantasy and magic where things are shinier, brighter, and as Calvino says “where paths bristling with obstacles lead to a happiness held captive by dragons.”