Literature, from Latin “littera”--letter, is external, mutual awareness, lax from dependence on one delicate biological being and from that person's limited lifespan. It embodies time lived, either real or fictional, and has the power to untamed both the writer and the reader, if not from time itself, technically, then from a limited sense of time.

Literature is like a dream, trance, a reverie, in that wherein, the shift is genuinely intellectual, and invites us into, and inculcates us with, the temporal dreams of others. We may find some dreams so real, so mysterious, so compelling and undeniable, so ingenuous, that we are in awe of the dream and the dreamer, the novel and the author, the ‘happily-ever-after’ tale and the bard. Dreams, per se, are offhand, we live outside of time; the stuff in our lives is in compact, rearranged, by a facility which we do not seem to control. Literature gives us power, ability to control and manipulate the image-and-thought-stream of life and our representations of life…our stories.

Reminiscence…recollection…memory, retrieved by an entity, a vision, a flavour, an experience, is explored, radiating as empowering myth, illusion, fabrication, a forewarning fable, a rich and abounding expansion of our own time to include a fictional other's sense of life; another's consciousness.

The photo shown above is what exactly I think of Literature. Like the eyes, expressing our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Inside it, you can find serenity, war, freedom, slavery, light, darkness, painful or joyful occurrences.

Studying Literature is indeed an important factor for me. It is the shaping of my individuality. The whole me. By it, I can see the reflection of myself in different perspectives. I grow. I mature. I see everything around me with full of sense, importance, value. I will learn to appreciate everything. Analyze everything. Through Literature, I cannot be fixated inside the box and be stagnant but I will go out of it and explore with wit and greatness. Loving literature for me is like loving yourself. It is preventing yourself form deprivation. Nobody wants that.

We can invent as many new concurrences of event and emotion as there are moments of consciousness. This exploration of temporality and our conquering of it, I believe, is one of the most important facets of literature.

Photo source: http://chinaabc.showchina.org/chinaabc_en/CultureNews/Firsterm/200706/t117530.htm