On Being Lost, Part 2: Prose Portals and Other Ways Out

In my last post I explored the idea that being lost may not be such a bad thing.  A certain way of being lost might actually be a very good thing. It can provide escape, liberation, and even, sometimes, transcendence. The arts allow us to explore this way of being lost and with relatively little risk. In fact, a remarkable cost/benefit ratio is at play. For just a little bit of time and concentration, a good book, for example, can return a moving, unique, and maybe once-in-a-lifetime experience. These experiences can stay with us forever. They become a part of us, indistinguishable from the identity we temporarily and happily surrender to acquire them.

How does this work? For books, and evidently poems as well, one explanation is the Prose Portal. In The Eyre Affair Jasper Fforde tells the story of Thursday Next, an agent of Special Operations 27—Literary Detectives. Her uncle invents a bookworm powered device that allows people, by stepping through it, to leave everyday reality and enter the world of whatever work of fiction they choose. Of course, given its power, the Prose Portal soon draws the attention of the defense industry that would exploit it for profit, as well as a master criminal who would use it merely to amuse himself by doing things like erasing Hamlet from Hamlet. To find out more, you’ll have to read the book, but it does point to the feature that makes books such fun: participation.

The irony and the key to fully participating in a story, a movie, or a song is that we give ourselves up to it. We lose ourselves in it. If it’s really good, if a book taps directly into what we need from it, the dissolution of self into story is unnoticeable, and once there ordinary time has no meaning. A book can last a day, a few weeks, a year or span many generations depending on what its author wants to do.  It’s so easy to fall into a book and wake up a couple of hours later with no idea where the time, or yourself, has gone. The trick works for other media as well.  The singular moment captured by a painting can last forever, or at least as long as you can remain in the gallery. The notes of melody can trigger a tangible memory, as if reliving the first time you heard it. That’s escape and it’s powerful stuff.

Sometimes, that’s all it is — or ever will be — nothing wrong with that. Everyone needs a way out every now and then — a place to go just to get away from it all. Other times, though, you’ll carry something away from your escape; a kind of souvenir, a memory, an insight, a new way of seeing things or understanding the real world to which you’ve returned. And then you realize that you’re not quite the same person you were before you got lost.