Peter Mendelsund Famous Quotes
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If books were roads, some would be made for driving quickly - details are scant, and what details there are appear drab - but the velocity and torque of the narrative is exhilarating. Some books, if seen as roads, would be make for walking - the trajectory of the road mattering far less than the vistas these roads might afford. The best book for me: I drive through it quickly but am forced to stop on occasion, to pull over and marvel.
Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader. Words "contain" meanings, but, more important, words potentiate meaning...
Characters are ciphers. And narratives are made richer by omission.
From where is the material for my picturing this scene derived? I search my memory to find a similar place, with similar docks. It takes a while.
But then I remember a trip I took with my family when I was a child. There was a river, and a dock--it's the same dock as the dock I just imagined.
I realize later that, when a new friend described to me his home in Spain, with its "docks," I was picturing this same dock--the dock I saw on my childhood vacation; the dock I "used" already in imagining the novel I am reading.
(How many times have I used this dock?)
Authors are curators of experience
When my eyes are closed, the seen (the aurora borealis of my inner eye lids) and the imagined (say, an image of Anna Karenina) are never more than a volitional flick away from each other. Reading is like this closed-eye world-and reading takes place behind lids of a sort. An open book acts as a blind-its boards and pages shut out the world's clamorous stimuli and encourage the imagination.
Once a reading of a book is under way, and we sink into the experience, a performance of a sort begins...
We perform a book-we perform a reading of a book. We perform a book, and we attend the performance.
(As readers, we are both the conductor and the orchestra, as well as the audience.)
Audition requires different neurological processes than vision, or smell. And I would suggest that we hear more than we see while we are reading.
When you first open a book, you enter a liminal space. You are neither in this world, the world wherein you hold a book (say, this book), nor in that world (the metaphysical space the words point toward). To some extent this polydimensionality describes the feeling of reading in general-one is in many many places places at at once once.
