The Miracle of the Novel

Microfiction about the power of novels.

“It would have been cool not to have been up my own ass all these years,” he reflected bitterly. He had just finished reading a novel that, for the moment, had breathed life into the most sensitive and reflective parts of his mind, parts long since dormant. As powerful as this novel was, however, it wasn’t powerful enough to provoke in the man’s mind a sustained reflection of this nature. Instead, almost as soon as he had lamented having been up his own ass for so long, he considered how alone he was in his thoughts, and, shockingly, wondered if anyone else had ever felt the same way.

The man was not only still up his own ass, he was up his own ass without knowing it, and even the obvious fact that most people experience this exact sense of sorrow for their own self-absorption from time to time, completely escaped him. Perhaps it was the pain of finally reflecting on his own life after such a long hiatus that caused him to backslide instantly into a posture of reflection so fatally self-obsessed it was scarcely reflection at all.

Was he the kind of man who, while capable of a spasmodic empathy was utterly incapable of conceiving that others might be more empathetic than he? This is the kind of question he would never even ask, so far up his own ass he still was. Worse yet, no novel, nor any work of art, had yet been conceived that was powerful enough to catapult into him this simple, self-evident truth about other people: they were just as soulful and complex as he was, if not much more so.

All that said, it should still count as a profound miracle that a novel was written at all that could, for even one moment, cause this particular man to think twice about how his self-absorption had cost him friendships and love and happiness and a more meaningful and less lonely life, had he somehow not been up his own ass for all this time.