Anticipation

Since Janet so kindly reminded us of Carly Simon's song earlier this week, it's been running like a mantra through my head...and since this connects so nicely with Lisa's post this week about the "Massacre at Noon," I couldn't resist:

We can never know about the days to come, but we think about them anyway...

When I was an undergraduate elementary ed major, I took a course in Introduction to Teaching Reading, and one of the keys to teaching small children critical reading skills, we learned, was to teach them to predict and anticipate: "What do you think will happen next? Will Polly eat her peas?"

Anticipation is neatly tied to the concept of suspense, and we can anticipate good things or bad--like in a horror movie, when the heroine is running around half-naked trying to get away from the bad guy, and the music builds and builds and builds--we know that any moment now, that bad guy is going to suddenly be there, bloody knife in his hand and an evil grin on his face--and yet, when it happens (just as we anticipated), we still jump, let out a startled cry, and then watch as the anticipation begins to build all over again.

Why--when life is so darn suspensful on its own--do we feel the need to regurgitate this stuff in our fiction?

And tomorrow we might not be together. I'm no prophet and I don't know nature's ways...

Life is inherently suspenseful. We never know what tomorrow holds, when our time will end, when life is going to throw us a curve ball. The only thing that's certain is uncertainty. We imitate this anticipation and suspense in our fiction, I think, to help us deal with our very real fear of the unknown. Because many times, in fiction, the ending can be anticipated--and unlike real life, most of the time our predictions for fictional endings are pretty accurate (after all, we've been practicing since we were barely out of diapers, right)?

I'll...stay right here cause these are the good old days...

All we have is now. Today. This moment. We can anticipate tomorrow, next week, next month, but life's endings are much more difficult to predict. Tom Clancy once said, "The only difference between fiction and real life is that fiction has to make sense." Making sense out of reality is obviously a much more challenging prospect...