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fiction is equally important to nonfiction in understanding the world
…desperately trying to phrase this better than “in its deliberate attempt to be real, it is more real than the real thing” and tragically failing
fiction is disarming. the brain can accept the fictional world as real on its own terms, without having to be troubled by its compatibility with this world. in this way fiction can allow us to experience and understand things that we blind ourselves to in reality
fiction is disarming in its intimacy. the characters and world of a fictional story exist in their truest form in the mind of the reader. there is no external internality they are subservient to. you can have a relationship with a fictional character, you can't with nonfiction
Then, too, [Aesop] was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events. And the poet, after telling his story, leaves a healthy-minded reader cudgeling his brains to know whether it really happened; whereas one who, like Aesop, tells a story which is false and does not pretend to be anything else, merely investing it with a good moral, shows that he has made use of the falsehood merely for its utility to his audience.
Apollonius of Tyana