Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Discovery of a center of pleasure

I recently realized one major reason why reading gives me such a high. When I read something which manages to articulate my own half baked thought - the silhouette of a thought actually, in a beautiful manner, I experience a kind of "Exactly!" moment within my head. I look up to the writer with admiration for having gone beyond the end of my intellectual air strip and taken off and at the same time I look at the writer with kinship for having a similar algorithm of brain function. This sensation happened twice in quick succession and caused me to stumble upon the location of this particular center of pleasure. Once when I was reading a book excerpt of Zadie Smith's NW on npr.org and I came across this line:

" Of course, it's harder for a man to be objective. They have the problem of pride."

And another time when I was reading an article called "How is the critic free" by Caleb Crain on the Paris Review blog and I came across this line:

"I’d argue, to the contrary, that readers choose their favorite publication in part because of these constraints—because they trust that its reviewers share certain political and aesthetic touchstones."

And both times it felt like someone has penciled in the features in an outline I saw, written lyrics to a melody I heard and both times it tingled!

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