“In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the ‘shalt nots’ of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. One of my favorite childhood books, A Wrinkle in Time, described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.”
-Anna Quindlen, 'How Reading Changed My Life.'
This relates the powerful impact of fiction on the imagination and heart of the reader. It illustrates the phenomenon of entering a story-world via imagination, which world affects the entrant as surely as the world from which he came.
The Ten Commandments and derivative principles should not be replaced by the good lessons from fiction (novels, short stories, plays, etc), but such fiction does serve to offer them up in ways that are quite influential and inspirational. Caution is due, however, as that fiction must be informed not from human imagination and social mores as though they are autonomous, but from an imagination and culture that is imbued with and acquiescent to the revelation of God through the scriptures.
