To dlowell_rb

Very cool thoughts on getting to experience the writer's intellectual "experience" of the stories. I would love to be able to experience "Something Wicked This Way Comes" exactly as imagined by Bradbury.

On the other hand, wouldn't Bradbury's actual version of the story change as he went through various life experiences? I'll bet his visualization of his early works would take on significant differences were he to "write" them again. For me, religion and the meaning of its stories and symbols have all changed for me as I've aged and gone through life's beauties and its garbage. I have to imagine that an author's vision of a story would be different at different stages of his/her life, and that, as a result, the stories would also change.

Also, for me, the thing that makes literature great, is that it creates a climate where a story is collaborative between the author and the reader. As I read Farenheit 451, for example, I create the looks of the characters, the sounds of their voices, their mannerisms. I create the settings (within the parameters allowed by the descriptions). I analyze and interpret the impact and import of the various ideas as they are argued by characters or articulated by a narrator. As much as I love film (and I'm a big fan!), they formulate more of the experience for the viewer than a book does for the reader. Film, to the viewer, is a much more passive medium than is a book to the reader. In a film, the images are already provided, in a book, we make them ourselves. [I will concede that it is far easier to make out with a loved one while watching a film than while reading a book; so I'll gladly concede that advantage to film!]

The work of reading requires a phenomenal application of the imagination to make the experience complete. People who say reading is boring are either reading the wrong stuff, or have not yet developed their imaginative faculties to the point where reading is a "living" and "creative" experience for them. Too bad for them.

I love this quote on reading by Henry Thoreau:

"To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the cusyoms of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written." (Walden)

I realize your concluding sentence in the third paragraph provides for the individual use of the imagination -- so I'm really just affirming a part of your posting.

On the idea of implants behind the eyelids . . . I can't even force myself to do contacts! This is one that will take younger and braver souls than I.

Thanks for the response, Mr. Dark.

You've added some intriguing insight.