Why is that while a good film or play may elate me, a good book nourishes me?
It must be something to do with the length of the respective experiences: the novel has enough time to worm its way into your affections, insinuating itself into your portable world, becoming a fellow traveller on the daily carousel. A great book can become that ‘good friend’ aspired to by innumerable writers from Defoe, Fielding and Sterne onwards.
I think, though, there’s something more to it than that. Theatre and film are, like it or not, external in their approach. They are, to hack William Gibson’s phrase, consensual hallucinations of a world. A good novel competently creates the illusion of another mind.
Even after a lifetime of empirical evidence that other people really do exist, I suspect that we all still find the unbridgeable gap between our mind and others a troublesome thing, that we are all Berkeleyans at heart just as we were as kids. Perhaps novels are the best evidence that over the bridge the world looks pretty much the same. Perhaps they’re the best evidence that there is something over the bridge.
I really think I read to know that I’m not the only soul.
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