(Spoiler alert: I spoil it a bit if you haven’t read it. Continuing…)
A few weeks back I found myself stuck at O’Hare with a good many other wayward travelers. We were cuddling up to the fluorescent glow of a late night terminal that was supposed to be just another stop along the way. Everyone knows someone in Chicago, but when it’s 11:00 pm and you’ve got to get checked back in by 5:00, there’s not much they can do for you anyway. So you sit. So you wait. Sleep comes and goes and comes back again.
So, adrift in the modern world and waylaid at the intersection of the Jet Set and Snow, I docked my mind to the final pages of Life of Pi, tossed and turned on Yann Martel’s waves of truth and fiction, and enjoyed a rare and satisfying lonesome.
And, in my state of relaxed resignation, I let Yann toy with me for a while longer.
He starts with his own story. In the for-once-necessary introduction he spins a tale of writing about Portugal while traveling through India. He sets us up to believe. He gives reason for the faith he later demands. I don’t ask if he’s really in India. I don’t ask if he really sent his first manuscript to Siberia (though, from a postal point of view, it’s akin so sending a package addressed to the Midwest.) He introduces us to the people that he meets, and tells us how he met them. And then he tells us Pi’s story as not much more than a stenographer. He writes in Pi’s voice (try reading any page with that stereotypical Kwik-E-Mart Indian accent — it works! it’s fun!) and he gives us facts. He gives us facts about zoos. He gives us facts about animals. Facts about husbandry. Facts about India. So many facts, it must all be true.
It must be true that Yann met an old man in Pondicherry who said, “I have a story that will make you believe in God.”
But a true story may not be a better story. Ask James Frey, ask Margaret Seltzer. There’s a reason for writing fiction. Life is good, but a story wants to be better:
Page 317:
Pi: “Which is the better story, the story with the animals or the story without the animals?”
Mr. Chiba: “The one with the animals.”
Pi: “Thank you. And so it goes with God.”
Page 64: (again, Pi:)
I can well imagine an atheist’s last words: “White, white! L-L-Love! My God!” — and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, “Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,” and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.
Thus it is resolved: Religion is the better story. Faith is the better story. And the sanctified imagination of the creative soul is the eye to the better story. And we must be like our Japanese inquisitors and embrace it as Truth.
Life is a creative act. That which happens, happens. In the mind of Pi, it is not about which story is “true” it is about which story is better. The better story is the story that should define one’s life. Again, from the introduction, “(we must not) sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”
And so here I am shipwrecked in Chicago, trying to get home from an expedition I didn’t want to take, my life torn and tattered at the mercy of much larger Plan. Crude reality be gone! Derailment is an opportunity, a chance to Create a Better Story for me, for my family as we ready ourselves to sojourn on. There’s a big fuzzy boundary between this world and the next, between fact and fiction. Who’s to say what’s real and what’s not. Who’s to say where one begins and another ends. I’m enjoying my stay here in the terminal stuck between this world and the next. My flight’s not due for a few more hours and then I’ll be off to something more. So it goes with me. And so it goes with God.
