She used to say, “The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight.”
Caged inside too many laws
By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumours, computer programs, anything that isn’t real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture
The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because it’s only the intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. They way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that’s the only lasting thing you can create.
Besides, at some point, the Mommy used to say, your memories, your stories and adventures, will be the only things you have left.
At her last trial, before this last time she went to jail, the Mommy had sat up next to the judge and said, “My goal is to be an engine of excitement in people’s lives.”
She’d stared straight into the stupid little boy’s eyes and said, “My purpose is to give people glorious stories to tell.”
Chuck Palahnuik, Choke