Quote:
Originally Posted by Alphapheemail
He ended the convo by saying that he felt that people who had their noses so much in other worlds and lives were just trying to escape from their own realities.
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Well, since he's so seriously engaged, someone's on the job. I'll feel free to go on escaping, then.
Honestly, though, I usually think of reading lit as
entering into life even more deeply.
And there's a correspondence, an exchange. You can be shaped by what you read as much as by what you eat.
A line of poetry from Auden or Sassoon; a hilarious bit out of Heller; something vulgar and brilliant out of Mailer; the cool griefs of Duras; the bite of Amis; the wind-up nightmares of H. Ellison; the abysses in Lovecraft; they pop into my head at all sorts of weird times. . .recollections of what they intended and strange mirrors on what I've become by reading them.
If I want just to
escape, and who doesn't sometimes, I damn well can. Isn't that why the Flying Spaghetti Monster invented video games?