"I read novels in order to indulge in a concentrated and directed sort of inner activity that is not available in most of my daily transactions. This reading, more than anything else I do, parallels—and thereby tunes up, accentuates—my own inner life, which is ever associative, a shuttling between observation, memory, reflection, emotional recognition, and so forth. A good novel puts all these elements into play in its own unique fashion.
WHAT IS THE POINT, the value, of this proxy investment? While I am reading a novel, one that reaches me at a certain level, then the work, the whole of it—pitch, tonality, regard of the world—lives inside me as if inside parentheses, and it acts on me, maybe in a way analogous to how materials in parenthesis act on the sense of the rest of the sentence."
Excerpt from Sven Birkerts' essay "Reading in a Digital Age"
I'm always fascinated by the question of why we read fiction, as well as why some people never read fiction. I can see the point of view of non-readers; why read about people who don't exist? That question was brought home to me quite forcibly the first time I read Little Women, in elementary school. I remember sobbing painfully while reading about Beth's death, and at the same time wondering to myself what in the world was going on - I was crying about a person who had never lived and therefore could never die. I was terribly upset about, in a sense, nothing.
The mystery of how and why we enter fictional worlds, and why they are so powerful . . . well, that is something Birkerts touches on in his essay, although most of it is about the equally fascinating question of how digital media may be changing this experience.
Photo courtesy Flickruser Lin Pernille
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