To Read is Not to Live

The honest and descriptive language of Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" makes us feel that we are in Vietnam. The book forces us to look more closely into the truth of a difficult time. But at the end of the day, we are not really there. We may shudder and say yes, war is horrible, I understand how hard it is now, I have now felt what all these soldiers feel. We feel sympathy for veterans and decide that now we understand them. But really, we will not truly understand until we have been to war- and that means that most of us will never truly understand. Human communication has limitations, and although a great writer can evoke powerful emotions and imagery, words cannot recreate a complete experience for the reader. Neither can movies, plays, or phone calls.

However, humans are not confined only to those events that they can be physically present for. Readers of “The Things They Carried” may not understand war the way that soldiers who were in Vietnam understand it, but they do experience emotions through reading that are true. Curt Lemon’s death may not have devastating weight to someone who didn’t know him and didn’t see him die, but that doesn’t mean that O’Brien’s account of the event hold no relatable truth- on the contrary, readers gain an experience with grief and shock. They can take these emotions and relate them to events that they have experienced, adding depth to their understanding of themselves, of emotions, of other people, and of the world. They may not be able to completely understand Rat Kiley’s grief, but they can use their knowledge of what happened combined with their own experiences to relate in a way that they could not if the story had never been told.

There are more than 7 billion people in world today. Each and every one of these people will have millions of individual experiences completely unique to them (because even if someone else experienced it, chances are they did not experience it in the same way). These experiences cannot be duplicated, nor can they be perfectly communicated.

But each story that is told brings with it a truth, or rather, many pieces of the truth, which cannot be put back together to make the original picture but can be put together to make a new image. It's these new conclusions and experiences that make sharing stories so incredibly important- they're the path to understanding each other and ourselves. So go ahead. Talk to your friends about their life drama for hours. Watch some Netflix, and then a little more. After all, it’s in the name of working towards world peace. Or something.