Everyday Canvas

Literature and Heroes

For "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" 

Prompt: “Literature was born on the day when a boy came crying ‘wolf, wolf’ and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature,” says Vladimir Nabokov.

From your own personal point of view, what is literature to you?

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Literature may be any written work for most but the way I see it, literature is something that leaves a lasting effect on me or at least some effect. It may have been written at one time or another, but also it may be spoken, such as in audiobooks or even speeches. Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” and Ronald Reagan’s Brandenburg Gate speeches, for example. Yes, they were rhetorical but they moved us, didn’t they? Then, there are the works written for stage and film, some of which I consider great literature.

The beauty of literature is that it emerges from the interior of the human head and heart, which are infinite. Of course, crappy stuff can emerge, too. I should know about that since I’ve produced some myself and keep doing it.

The music in the lines of poetry, the sounds and meanings of words working together, unseating the prose from its throne even when fractured and dissonant, is literature, too. Be it prose, poetry, fiction, or non-fiction, to call a piece of work literature, it must be universal and at the same time deeply personal. It has to be fluid with identity, dealing with a fundamental human situation, metamorphosis, or a bit of transformation.

As to fiction, it can be realistic or imagined. I make no distinction between genres or the literary general fiction. Neither do I have any prejudices as to language, form, or length when it comes to literature, even in the work of a newbie writer who is an author in the making.

What I don’t consider decent writing, let alone literature, is this whirlpool of disinformation some of the media has sunk to recently, during these most trying times. Over such pieces, I’ll take the worse pieces of WdC members who are at least trying and working very hard to produce something halfway acceptable. Then, I also think some of the work here is also truly stunning and high quality.

For: "Space Blog Group" 

Prompt: From Charity Marie - <3 ’s "Ordinary Heroes" 
Heroes. Write about heroes, fictional or real.
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A hero to me is someone who acts courageously when faced with a difficult problem.

People who perform heroic acts at the drop of a hat without realizing what they are doing are not heroes, in my estimation. For example, if you see a little child on the path of a gunfire and you run to grab her and get her to safety, you are a hero. But if you are cowering behind a crate when gunfire erupts and a little child comes near you to hide with you, you are not a hero.

Talking of today’s problems, healthcare workers who face this Covid 19 threat are heroes. But healthcare workers who quit their jobs because of the Covid 19 threat are cowards, not that I blame them or anything, but in every profession and calling some danger exists. Those who can’t face that danger shouldn’t be in such a profession.

Other kinds of heroes can be the policemen, firefighters, parents who raise children alone and with no help from anyone, people working in labs to find cures or to explore, people who try to help the homeless and the unfortunate, etc.

In short, to be a hero, a person has to have some moral brilliance and has to show it.