It’s Not Escapism

…’Escapism’ has never really made sense to me.

Photo by Jeff Finley on Unsplash

(If you don’t feel the same, if you’re escaping, then do so, and enjoy every moment of it.)

It’s not escapism.

It never has been, for me.

How could it be? When every part of there came from here?

The worlds of fantasy, of art, of reality — they are inextricably bound. You can’t remove them from each other, any more than you can take Middle Earth away from Tolkien’s time in the trenches of WW1. Even if you don’t know it’s there, it’s there. It’s what made it.

Art and ‘reality’ dance together: art imitating life, life imitating art.

They are the process, they are the dance, they are the divine brought into the practical, the practical brought into the divine.

But the concept of escapism has always felt… like a deception, to me. A personal lie. It’s not an escape — it’s a reckoning.

Prompt from the resolute Ravyne Hawke:

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we…