I'm in Palm Springs at the moment, and the temperature outside is over 100 degrees F. Ironically, what I've been writing is a TV movie about an avalanche. I kept the air conditioning turned to "high" to get into the mood. To me, the true wonder of writing, but also of reading, is how easily it allows us to slip into other worlds.
In an essay in which she recalls her education in a one-room schoolhouse, Joyce Carol Oates writes, "Franz Kafka has famously said that a book is an ax for the frozen sea within. How more accurate to see any artwork as a portal of a kind through which we step, like Alice through the looking glass, into worlds not our own and unimaginable by us, conjoining ourselves with persons not known to us. In the cramped, finite space of the one-room schoolhouse what an infinite space was evoked: Each book, its cover opened, led miraculously inward and downward, tunneling away from the mere surface of things." *
Being able to take those journeys is a blessing, and sometimes I wonder whether kids growing up today with less time for reading are going to miss out on it. The internet is an infinite space too, and one for which I'm grateful (not least because it conjoins me with you reading these words) but at least for me it'll never take the place of the fresh joy of turning the first page of a book...or writing the first page of one.
(*The essay appears in "The Writing Life," edited by Marie Arana, published by PublicAffairs, 2003; by the way, I've just added a new "reviews" page on my website, www.timetowrite.com, on which I review writing-related books.)