A skilled author directs my consciousness and off I go into another dimension peopled with characters simple or complex, settings familiar or bizarre, past, present or future. Time becomes porous. Real time melts into fictionalized time. Hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries, and millennia are experienced inwardly while outwardly the clock ticks off mere minutes. Ensconced in the warm comfort of my study, secure in the stable circumstances of my life, I become enraptured, jubilant, saddened or terrified as the author dictates. All from words on a page!
A well crafted story is like a dream. Who can tell while experiencing a dream that it is not real? Reading is akin to meditating: thoughts drift in and out of consciousness as the reader remains aware of reading in the same way that the meditator remains aware of breathing. In both instances actuality is blurred: what is really happening? Why at the climax of the story do I refuse to do anything short of saving a life until the the conflict is resolved? How is it that my knowledge of human nature and of different times and places is expanded through works of fiction?
How marvelous life would be if we were all skilled authors, or even editors!
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