The Conspiration of The Universe (Published under Cloak Pop Fiction)

Fourth: The Trigger (37)

37

(page 125 of 126)

                  This day marks the last day of our Social Science class. Mrs. Briones after conducting our final exam had prepared a short speech.

                  “Don’t think that I have forgotten your term paper. You’ll pass it later. But now, I want to thank all of you for being wonderful thinkers. I had fun in this class really. You have interacted with me even though you are in huge classroom surrounded by strangers. Before I let you go and pass through that incredibly large door, I would like to tell you that I hope I have changed you. I hope outside this room you’ll see a different world- a world which is complex, governed by many social traditions but a very beautiful world. Again thank you, and after passing your paper you may go.”

                  Her speech was very fulfilling. She did change me. She made me realize some things about life. This class may not be a literature class or something but it somewhat made me realize that a book’s ending was not that important as many readers value it. The ending might be very predictable but it doesn’t mean that the book is already lame. What is important is how the characters grew between the first page and last page. Like the book characters, a life of a person is not judged by how they died it’s how they lived it.

                  I checked my short essay first before passing it:

Luke Monasterio

Mrs. Briones

SOCSCI 1

My deviant act was to fall in love with a book, more specifically a character of a book. This may sound absurd but deviance itself was absurd.

While preparing to write this essay, a question runs on my head: Is it so important to care about the characters of the book?

I remembered Rene Descartes’ famous philosophical statement “Cogito Ergo Sum” which translates to “I think, therefore I am”. The mere fact that one thinks then it proves that they exist. I learned that statement from a story where a devil questions a man of his existence.

“How can you be assured that you really exist?” the devil asked the man. The man meditated for the answer and came up with “I think, therefore I am”.  Now I placed myself on the man’s shoes but the devil would have a different side of question. “How could you know that she exist?” referring to the book character that I admired. This question haunted me for a while so I have put a lot of thought in it. She exist because...because I loved her.  I feel therefore she is. That would be my answer. And let me put it this way; we cannot be sure of anything in this world really existed. Maybe you, the reader of this essay only imagined all of this ‘reality’ but there is one thing you could be sure of, that I could be sure of. And that is how I feel. Characters from movies, stories, books...there would come a time that we would admire them or even hate them and for me, that feeling towards these characters are good enough to say they exist. To put it simply, if I feel something towards a character, if I dared to care or hate them, then they deserve to exist. They are worthy of existence. Eureka, the name of the character I loved was for me the realest girl I’ve known. 

Taking in to consideration what I have established from above then therefore it is important to care about the characters of a book. I even think that writers aim for the reader’s sympathy. The sad thing is, a character, as many writers would probably believe, would cease to exist after they finished writing the book. That is what I deemed to be the drawn line between life and literature. As soon as the book ends then its characters, in whichever state they’re in, would stop being them. They have no more future to look forward to; no more tomorrow to think of because time stopped for them or rather time stopped them. All of the people they seem to know would disappear with them and that is just lonely. As for us, we live every day unknown of what lies ahead, we have no known plot to follow. Yes, life would eventually stop in medias res but there would be someone who will live on for us no matter how unsociable we are. This is where I realized as a reader, as a fan, that we were given a choice to live on the characters that once existed on these books, a choice to remember them and feel them because they are worthy, because that is the most human thing to do . That’s why we take care of books, because they are a memento.

My deviant act was falling in love with Eureka Cortez, a character of a book, and I choose to incessantly fall for her.