Quote:
Originally Posted by J. Strnad
These things bring pleasure only through association with the pleasure of reading.
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Yes, this is quite true. I doubt if anyone (well, anyone sane, which probably excludes most hardcore foodies) gets major pleasure out of admiring pictures of beautiful plates of food they will never eat. However, engaging other senses can
enhance the primary activity.
Continuing with my food analogy, there's a reason why a full meal mushed together into sort of a meatloaf is used by prisons as a punishment, not by restaurants. It's the same thing, isn't it? After all, as my mother used to tell me when I carefully kept my peas separate from my mashed potatoes, it all gets mixed together in your stomach anyway. Think how much more convenient fast food would be if they just put your burger, fries, and drink in a blender, and served it up like a shake, maybe with an extra-long straw, so you could drink it on the road without even having to take it out of your car's cupholder. I haven't seen McD's doing that, though, and they'll do anything that makes a penny, so I have to presume there's just not much market demand. While eating is about ingesting nutrients, just like reading is about ingesting words, the way we ingest them, and the setting we ingest them in, can enhance or detract from our enjoyment of the activity.
Maybe most people only use one sense at a time. I wouldn't know; I can only go by my own feelings.
And here's a weird one ...
I was going to write about how, when I was a kid, my uncle gave me some old books he'd read as a boy, books which I avidly read but, like most of my books, I eventually traded in at the used bookstore (which I have regretted for many years). One of those books was "The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire", and there were a couple of the Tom Swift books, etc. My uncle died many years ago, but those books started me on my hobby of collecting the old boys' series books. Well ... as I was writing this, just on a whim I googled my uncle's name. He was probably the only person in the country with his highly unusual name, and certainly the only one in his very small hometown in 1936. That's when, as I just found out, he -- a Boy Scout -- swam out and saved a child from drowning when a boat overturned during a school outing; she was one of only three survivors out of the fifteen children who had been on that boat. I listened to a recording of her (now, of course, an elderly lady) describing the tragedy for an oral history project. My uncle was a hero. I never knew.
I wish I still had his books. I wonder if those stories of heroic boys inspired him to rescue that little drowning girl. When I handle the old books, I always think about the people who first owned them, the ones who ordered them from the lists at the back of the book ... $1, cloth-bound, with color dust jacket ... maybe slipped off to read them when they should have been doing their chores, or read them at night before bed. There's a connection with the past there, in holding the things they held. I have "The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire" on my Sony Reader. I've read it again, and it's still a fine book. But I wish I still had the book, the exact physical book, that had been owned by, and read by, and maybe inspired, my uncle.
And now I've been thrown totally off ... not even sure what I was meaning to write, or where I was going with this post. I suppose I should go back and edit it, and take out the stuff about my uncle, and keep the focus on the whole multi-sensory thing. But what the heck, I'll toss it up there as it is. I'm a little freaked out at the moment; it's kind of startling to find out about something like that.