I'm sitting here in the dead of night feeling a sense of uneasiness and dissatisfaction. I don't know how to quell this feeling, and I can't even figure out a way to describe it.
But it got me thinking about the stories I've read, and the fictions I've inhabited through other media. I think we often go to stories to express the feelings that define our lives. As readers we can call upon and relate to memories we discovered within pages. I mean, this is a pretty fantastical way to put it, but books are like supposed to be a collective compilation of human wisdom aren't they? I can imagine some grandiose picture of generations of our forefather's experiences passing down through time to the point our of existence.
Yet I can't recall a thing that relates to what I'm feeling now. Not a shred of wisdom is available to me right now. Not from books at least. I think what it is, is that stories are about the passionate things in our lives. The large and stand-out end up making their existence worthy. More than that, is that stories are coherent. They have to be. A writer needs to be able to communicate to their audience, and can only reach them through some accepted form of translation. Otherwise there is no actual sense to the story.
This is what I see lacking when I try to apply the lessons of books to real life - real life is awkward, real life is not coherent. In a real conversation people stutter, people mutter, people mishear or lose their train of thought. In books these actions are used to attribute character, in real life people misunderstand each other with no relation to any "plot." More importantly, in real life people don't know what they are doing. People don't act in accordance to their "character," people don't act reasonably despite having suitable access to information. Sometimes people act/don't act for no discernible reason.
I found myself in an awkward situation earlier today. The occurrence was so mundane that it's not worth describing, yet I feel that the people involved were seriously emotionally impacted. I was not the origin of the awkwardness but I experienced it first-hand. None of us involved acted within accordance to how we normally acted. It was completely unintentioned. Different people said different things and were on different lines of thinking. It ended unnoticeably as it began.
I'll get off the cryptic story. The TL;DR is what I got out of this uneasy unreasonable unrelatable experience. Real life is awkward and unintentioned. Books cannot capture that without being themselves incomprehensible. There's thus a chasm between what real life really feels like and what feelings stories can provide us with. I'm lamenting this, and I want to ask, what are your thoughts?
Edit - I should admit I'm not anything more than an average college age reader. I know there is literature that explores this awkward incomprehensible feeling. But do you not feel that it doesn't really capture that feeling, without getting incomprehensible itself?