"Reading has compelled me to focus my vision. When I read a fine description of a familiar scene from nature, for instance, I experience a complex delight. Yes, I say, that's it. That's what I have seen. But the description does more than that. It articulates, clarifies, illumines my vision, making me see better than I have before the fierce and fragile beauty of the world.
"And reading has changed how I see, or have seen, others (isn't this the point of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man?); it enlarges my vision. Alice Walker's The Color Purple makes me see the world through the eyes of a black woman. In Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, I live inside the head of a Jewish intellectual in Chicago. I become intimate with a reluctant Czech dissident in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I can hardly conceive how limited my perception would be without the books I have been privileged to read, how superficial my understanding of others, how undeveloped my sympathies. And I mean here, especially, without fiction, which puts flesh and blood on, and the soul and feeling in, other human beings. Precisely because if its appeal to my imagination, which Webster's dictionary defines as 'the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality,' in fiction I come to know and understand people I may not have met otherwise. And thus I am persuaded to a more compassionate, generous, and loving response in my life beyond books."
