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 A new blog to contain answers to prompts |
Since my old blog "Everyday Canvas "  became overfilled, here's a new one. This new blog item will continue answering prompts, the same as the old one. Cool water cascading to low ground
To spread good will and hope all around.  |
| Prompt: Reading "Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real" - Nora Ephron. Your thoughts? --------------- Me and reading? You hit the nail on the head. I learned to read well enough before I was four years of age and I've never let go of books ever since, this causing sometimes the despair of other people in my life. Well, too bad! I could do nothing about their baseless despair, but take another book-reading cruise. Suppose, you're taking a cruise, yourself. Surely, the ship or the vessel you're boarding is essential but would you ever mistake the vessel for the journey, or maybe, consider the journey as only a temporary retreat? If you did, wouldn't you be shortchanging yourself? Similarly, the ship is the reading, and at its most basic level, reading is a form of low-cost, high-yield escapism. Its mechanics could be the physical parts of a book, its weight, ink, fonts, etc. But, what about the journey? In this journey, you and I leave behind our own worries and anxieties, for the information, and if fiction, for the characters' and the story's borrowed joys and anxieties. This form of escape is necessary as a mental and spiritual cleansing. When we trade our immediate lives inside our familiar living rooms with the exciting cop-burglar chase on the gas-lit streets of Victorian London or the imagined other beings in other forms that attack the space station, we are letting ourselves have the freedom from the tyranny of our present lives. Speaking for myself, while I read, I am deeply engrossed in the book or its plot and characters. So much so that I stop worrying about the mail or the check I've forgotten to send, the part of the house I've neglected to clean, or what to do if one of my sons has a problem that he may be hiding from me. Still, the best part of reading, in fact, is that its true magic isn't in its letting us flee reality, but in the transformation it causes in us. When we return to real life from a book, we are not unchanged. What we thought was a temporary escape has caused a permanent change in us. Let me try to look at those ways of change. First comes the feeling of empathy. When we are reading anything from anyone else's viewpoint, we are borrowing their consciousness. We are borrowing, in a story or in a memoir, the mindset of a slave being beaten or the personal pain of a refugee who carries the loss of his home in his backpack. In this way, reading is an exercise in perspective-taking, and it expands the bounds of the self. And empathy is not an escape but a vital tool for facing life's realities with understanding. Reading also gives us an intellectual edge. Be it fiction, non-fiction, history, science, philosophy, etc., it helps us gain context, vocabulary, and framework for all our thoughts. A good book gives us not only relief, but also an edge and information about the state of the world and its economy, political unrest, or spiritual agony. It offers language for articulation and understanding. In other words, it provides us with the most necessary tools to manage our confusion about the understanding of any situation. As we read, we are not just spending hours or being lost in the complex morality of, say, Fyodor Dostoevsky or the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes. Such books are building for us an internal home, an internal architecture, with layered understanding. Such a construction or structure makes any future reality or disaster less overwhelming and painful. The escape, therefore, is only the first step. The deeper effect of reading is the transformation that enables us to emerge from a book not just rested, but also, entirely reformed and remade. |
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