From "The Possibility of the Search," an essay by Sven Birkerts about his experience of re-reading Walker Percy's The Moviegoer after a period of years (published in The Believer, Feb. 2004):
When I am not taking on a book for ulterior purposes—reviewing being the most obvious—I don't ever really go to it for answers or thematic meanings in any conventional sense. Rather, I find that a novel for me is a pretext, a way of starting up and sustaining an inner transaction that I seem to need in order to locate myself in the world. Reading is a process that keeps the inner realm open, susceptible. If I cannot sink into some virtual "other" place, if I cannot triangulate my experience with that of another, I feel my life is lacking the shadows and overtones and the illusion of added dimension that imagination provides. It feels flat to me.
That passage gave me the sort of thrilling rush of metacognition that is one of my favorite sensations; that is exactly why I love to read. It is, however, a feeling that few of my students seem to share...