Have you ever had an unsettling dream that lingered long after you awoke? The kind of dream where something deep in your psyche whispered Ponder this! to your conscious mind? The kind of dream whose meaning became clear only much later, after you’d grown up and learned a bit more about yourself and about Life?
The best stories are also like that. Using the language of dreams, they convey unutterable insights — or rather, they inspire you to cultivate those insights within your soul and thereby grow wiser and better as a person.
I recently had an experience like that when I reread (after many years) Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan. In this post, I will discuss the importance of reading books that give you the kind of experience described above, provide a brief synopsis of this particular story (in case you haven’t read it recently, or ever), and examine some of the more important issues raised in this book. These issues are di…
