Sonder

Every story is a lesson. I could wax poetic about Joyce, that modernist icon who call sattention to the act of reading to highlight its unreality; I could cite Bulgakov with his endless comic wit and infinite recursions through the heart of Pontius Pilate, The Master and Margarita. I could talk endlessly of the beautiful scaffolding on the cathedral sentences on the prose that are Proust's magnum opus. I could tell you how Finnegans Wake is a perfect work of art, or Gravity's Rainbow is a beautiful conspiratorial labyrinth. I could admire Borges, or Dante or Murakami who have all buried themselves indelibly in my spirit. It would be appropriate; it would be literary. It would be in the spirit of those things which marry the highbrow with the low.

But those stories did not change me. They only confirmed what I believed.

The one story that changed me, was Mob Psycho 100.

Does that even count? A less than competently drawn manga about a boy overflowing with psychic ability, who is unable to truly express his emotions? The ultimate in pulp genre literature. Less than the now heralded pulp of previous centuries. A comic? Why not Hemingway? Why not Petrarch? Why not Ginsberg?

Because after I read the Paradiso of Dante, I pathologized courtly love.

But after Mob Psycho 100, I decided to go grocery shopping.

Because after Gravity's Rainbow, I feared for my sanity.

But after Mob Psycho 100, I allowed myself to emote.

Because after The Master and Margarita, I found humanity contemptuous.

But after Mob Psycho 100, I opened myself to vulnerability.

Because after Proust, I was lost in a sea of ghostly, ethereal beauty.

But after Mob Psycho 100, I grounded myself in the mundane, unsexy reality of here and now.

Because after Murakami, I was in an iterative, ever-shifting reality.

But after Mob Psycho 100, I was simply here.

Because after Joyce, I reveled in the creative chaos that art allows us.

But with Mob Psycho 100, I found the grains of days that allowed me to channel that chaos.

I love literature. But it wasn't until I read Mob Psycho 100 - in which vulnerability, mundanity, sincerity, and taking life one day at a time stuck with me - that I was able to make a meaningful, good change in my life.

It wasn't until Mob Psycho 100 that I felt that I didn't have to be miserable to be a good person.

So, to put it simply, I live by the simple rules of Mob Psycho 100. A medium-length manga, with a weak art style, and the simplest guide to living a good life I've ever read.