The characters one lives through

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked… I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

No one captured the daunting feeling of choosing who to become more eloquently than Sylvia Plath. The fear of regret from selecting a wrong path is often so strong, it paralyses us into inaction. We remain on the sidelines, hoping not to make a decision at all, until ultimately the regret we experience is not for having chosen poorly, but for not having chosen at all. By the time the realisation of a life wasted sinks in, it’s too late. All we can do is watch our life pass by like a missed train, while we stand on the platform, unable to move.

So is the cruelty of nature. It offers us a million possibilities but the capacity of picking only one. But man is a cunning being. He devised ways to achieve the privilege of multiple lives, a privilege reserved only for the gods. He created stories. He built worlds. He wrote books.

Man found ways to slip in and out of lives through the pages of novels he wrote.

Books might be man’s greatest creation yet. They let him taste the grief of a father losing his son, the longing for a partner that was never truly his, the thrill of falling in love, all encapsulated in a tiny piece of paper and ink. In them, he could live and die a thousand times, without ever leaving the quiet of his room.

It’s beautiful, I suppose, the quiet rebellion of it, like a whispered defiance against the tyranny of a single path. Books, like any other art forms, have always represented escapism, but novels go beyond and define another world to escape into. They have always been portals, not just mirrors. In them, we don’t just reflect our lives, we rewrite them. We imagine who we could have been, and sometimes, who we’re too afraid to become.

I’ve been Amir in The Kite Runner, living in Taliban-occupied Afghanistan. I’ve been Nora in The Midnight Library, I’ve felt the ache of unlived lives. I’ve been the nameless protagonist in Rebecca, navigating my identity in a world dominated by men. I’ve been Patroclus, lover of Achilles, doomed to love in silence and to die for a war that is not mine to fight.

Through them, I’ve grieved, yearned, fought, fled, fallen, and found myself again. These characters are not strangers on a page, they are echoes of all the lives I might have lived. And in reading them, I have lived a little more than one life, and that, I think, is a kind of salvation.

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