Finding Interest in the Quotidian

It has been the longstanding view in modern times that really serious artistic work is "realistic," with work that conspicuously departs from reality justly marginal--better-suited to, for example, children than adults, and people who are less than totally adult in some sense (the "nerd" who likes cartoons and video games, certainly, seen as less fully adult than their peers, and the inverse of the "cool" kid who appears more autonomous and sophisticated and grown-up than their peers). There have always been exceptions, of course, but the point is that they have been exceptions, this very much the rule.

Much of this may seem a matter of the general silliness that we get when people of conventional mind try to make distinctions about what is proper and what is not--which produce such absurdities as the idea that Fantasy Football is a pastime worthy of adults, but not playing football on a video game console. But it may be that there are more substantial factors inclining the young more toward the fantastic, the not so young toward the realistic--and especially the everyday. The young lead very limited lives, and the big wide world of which they have seen less--and the worlds beyond that--may have an attraction for them that they do not to a more experienced, more world-weary adult who has already seen a bit of the world, often on terms that have not been particularly pleasant, and been disillusioned by it, so that such things as long journeys to faraway places have not the same romance for them.

That sounds negative, and I have no intention of pretending it is not, but at the same time I do not think all the factors are negative ones. Alongside what they lose is there what probably is more likely to come with age than in any other way, the ability to take an interest in the little things, and the everyday things--mastery of the handling of the details of which is, after all, an area where realism has been stronger than those forms of fiction which incline to flights of fancy.