The Story of Nothing

“All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.” As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry says, the innocence of childhood is a core value in life that everyone is forever missing, which represents our most innocent mind as human beings that brightens like a shiny diamond. Fairy tales are not just for children but sometimes they also give adults a time to reminisce about lost dreams and fantasy.

Since I was a child, I have always longed for the fantasy world from fairy tales. As I was somewhat inactive but preferred reading books and imagining, the world in fairly tales was like an exit from the reality to a different world where I can make my own playground and dream, which became my valuable daily routine. As a grown up, I still read children’s stories but now I feel something different from the wide imaginary world that I had felt before. The rational way of thinking that I have developed while living in this complex modern society makes me doubt the relations between story characters or the feasibility of the plot. I keep asking questions like “Why is that?” and try to tell the story in a logical way. Then, fairy tales become the preserve of children only and are just The Story of Nothing to grown-ups. Just as a bird with a broken wing cannot fly, the way of thinking of people who cannot dream is becoming more limited in fixed forms.

The Story of Nothing is a title that I gave to my own fairly tale when I was ten years old. The story has quite a ridiculous plot where characters from different stories co-exist in the same story. The thoughts that I had at that time started from an imagination with questions like “Why can’t the girl in Little Red Hood be friends with the wolf?” to a ridiculous story that I made up where the Puss in Boots, who dethroned a king to take the power, shows up in the same story with The Town Musician of Bremen who run a circus to entertain people.

Dreaming itself can be a starting point for any action. I wish people could find a small seed of meaningful dreams that exist in all stories, even though they look like nothing.

Kim Sung Soo