Someone on Facebook posted this link to this amazing article from AmeicanScholar.org. http://www.theamericanscholar.org/reading-in-a-digital-age/ Please enjoy at your leasure.
A quote: “…the deeper nature of fiction. That it is inwardly experiential, intransitive, a mode of contemplation, its purpose being to create for the author and reader a terrain, an arena of liberation, where mind can be different, where mind and imagination can freely combine, where memory and sensation can be deployed, intensified through the specific constraints that any imagined situation allows.”
The last paragraph is a revelation: “Concentration is no longer a given; it has to be strategized, fought for. But when it is achieved it can yield experiences that are more rewarding for being singular and hard-won. To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened one’s essential position.”
Thanks for posting such an illuminating link! I’m printing it out to read on the bus :)