“To her, I realized, the line between dream and waking life was a distinction without a fundamental difference. She has no problem grasping what a dream is, and that it is different from what happens when she is awake. It is just that for her, the distinction is not a categorical one, but conditional—in the same way that some things are inside and some are outside, but could easily swap places. Everything is potentially true, and nothing is completely fictional.

Imagine, then, what it is like for her to read a book. The characters, the stories, the settings—they’re not real in the sense that she and I are real, she knows that. But they have a foothold in our reality, too. When she sees a man dressed up as Elmo in Times Square, not only does she believe that he is actually Elmo, but she’s not all that surprised to see him. He is simply at the end of the spectrum of reality closest to her, for the moment; later that evening he will be in a Sesame Street video on YouTube, and still later in Elmo’s ABC Book, and it all makes sense to her. She’s like the couple in the video for A-Ha’s “Take On Me,” moving effortlessly between the reality of the page and the reality outside it.”

http://www.themorningnews.org/article/read-it-again-dad

The thing I like about this is how he justifies reading just to read. I’ve never been a naturally analytical reader–I like to mainline stories directly into my brain as quickly as possible. It’s good to take notes, to mull over theme and symbolism and the rest, to deconstruct craft. But what I will always love the most is just forgetting myself entirely in someone else’s world. And I think there’s a lot to recommend that kind of reading, as well. Like Tim O’Brien said last night:

Reading this way has built me sentence by sentence into the particular pattern of firing synapses that makes me who I am. I’ve seen the world through a thousand perspectives, and that doesn’t go away when I put down a book. The Brothers Karamazov made me a better person, even if I can’t remember exactly how it ends.

“The things they carried is about not only the things carried during the war, but also the weight that is carried after the war.

There is a woman in Florida who wakes up every night and says, “Where’s my baby?”

Her son was my best friend over there, a black kid from Florida. He’s been dead for forty years. The war’s not over for her.

The mothers and fathers and lovers and children have to be counted among the casualties, too.”

-Tim O’Brien, Butler University Visiting Writer Series, March 2014