“We live within an intricate web of fictions—the fictions of daily gossip, the fictions of a profession or a career, newspaper fictions, the fictions of writers and communicators, the fictions or entertainments, the fictions of politics, the fictions of nationality—out of which we fashion a quilt of chosen fictions, a set that suits us—fictions of our childhood, of pieces of our past, fictions of our loves and our losses, fictions of the whole web of our lives. We constantly tell ourselves stories, dividing the continuum of our lives into tellable segments, each with a conclusion.
Language, however, is a slippery and sometimes treacherous element, and can glibly stray from the reality it is meant to deal with. It is for that reason that we have to take great care over the act of putting-into-words, the fashioning of our fictions. At best, it is an act of creation, part astonishment, part invention, part wisdom.
Perhaps our fictions, if they find their way appropriately into words, ironically, are the most durable thing about us.”
---Alastair Reid
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