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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1212523" data-attributes="member: 812">If I ever said you had to "contemplate" I apologize. It was cruel and unfair of me. While I have no complaint with contemplation, nothing I have said about the necessity of moral relevance requires it.What I am saying is that a tale is MORE entertaining when we recognize moral relevance in its reality to our own. Hamlet is a good entertaining read (one of the better summations of the play I've seen) BECAUSE we recognize that Hamlet's predicament is one that we might have moral difficulties in, too. We sympathize with his moral situation and we continue to read, in part at least, to see how he'll resolve it.Will he turn out a hero or a coward?That's what I mean by moral relevance.Interesting. I believe I have been educated, but I don't know that anybody ever told me what the meaning of a book was. Have you an example?My definition of "personal investment" is, I suspect, different from yours. If I said, "We come to care about what happens to the people described in the story," would you agree with that? Because that's all I'm REALLY trying to say.If you don't want it to tell you anything about yourself, rest assured I won't insist.Which is a very different proposition from pretending the book means a particular thing. 'Nuff repeated.Are you suggesting that nobody has ever had their morality changed by reading a story? Or are you saying that while books exist that are capable of changing people's morality, The Lord of the Rings is not one of them?If so, then you are committing the very sin you (rightly) accused me of, and are trying to give others what is yours alone. Because I promise you at least one person has had their morality changed by reading a book. Me. It's happened many, many times to me, as I have read books that challenged my view of the world. Michael Moorcock did it to me with A Cure For Cancer and The War Hound and the World's Pain. Steven Brust did it to me with Teckla, Agyar and other books. William Shakespeare keeps on doing it to me. Plato did it to me. Steven Erikson did it to me.And yes, John Ronald Reuen Tolkien did it to me. Several times over. And probably will again, because he's still that much smarter and wiser than me.And if no book has ever had that effect on you, then I wonder how your morality gets changed. Have you ever had your morality changed by something somebody said? By something you saw? Do you put reading in a special class of experience, the class from which moral lessons cannot emerge? Why is that? I'm curious.But all of that isn't even what I'm talking about when I say "moral relevance" -- what I was talking about above, there, with Hamlet and moral predicaments. I hope I was able to clarify that enough.I'm fascinated by this statement.How did you know what the morality of the characters was before you read the story? How do you decide what books to read if this is one of your criteria?</blockquote>

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