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We will always feel the need to escape our life, to journey from a world many of us consider dull or oppressing to spectacular, fantastical worlds, preferably inhabited with flying creatures who give us rides; where we can fight the bad guys without getting fired and be recognized as having truly awesome powers. Qualities, which in our normal life are detriments, in these worlds become our superpowers. It is the secondary worlds where we discover and strengthen them then return home to make our own life a thing of beauty and adventure.
that the fabric between our world and the after-life was the thinnest, when communication with departed loved ones the most likely. So in this case, it is a specific time, not a location, which is the portal. I wonder if my increased interest in portals has been triggered by the death of my parents and the expectation that I will precede my daughter to the grave. It is a small pain to consider that I will miss a big chunk of her life and an odd comfort to imagine a yearly holiday when I might get caught up on the events of her life.
One aspect of the portal genre is that it is something that happens to you and therefore you are absolved of a certain amount responsibility even if you are the only one doing the absolving. A portal is just a quick way of getting there without all the hassle of planning the trip and it does give you a certain license to be bold since you didn’t ask to be there in the first place.
Finally there is the commonplace, ubiquitous, portable portal on a seemingly endless variety of subjects. Pick up a book, start reading and you are transported to any number of lands and stories. I realize there is some internet buzz that the fantasy genre involving portals is passé. [And by buzz I mean the one comment on a website I found in researching this article.] However, I disagree. Contemporary literature and media may be currently awash with vampires and zombies living among us but there will always be a need for stories involving humans journeying to distant worlds.
Alice Gets Back in Her Book
Photograph By Lissy Laricchia