That title phrase belongs to William Sloane, who in his work The Craft of Writing says that the real reader and real reading produce a delight which brings one “almost to the point of loss of personal identity.” We can see the phenomenon, he says, by watching a child read:
Watch a child’s body when he is reading if you want to see the real reader. He wants to get on with the “story,” to be caught up in it, to become it, to take it into himself. In the process he may find much more, but he does so through that delight that is the highest form of entertainment.
Sloane means that when we give ourselves over to something, as a child does naturally without the objectifying thought-forms the years will inevitably bring, we are doing just that: giving our self away, whereupon we are for a time blessedly less our self, less that everyday personality we relentlessly clutch and defend and assert. Facing a work of art without that personal self (and with a bit more philosophy we could call it a personalized Self), we might just find ourselves more human, seeing into what is essential and common to all of us as human beings, not merely into what is peculiar to us alone.
Curiously, the same observation Sloane makes about the self-forgetting, world-attentive child can be made from the quite different angle of logic. Reasoning is traditionally divided into two forms, deductive and inductive. We reason deductively when we move from the general to the particular (all humans are mortal, so you are mortal too), and we reason inductively when we move in the opposition direction, from the particular to the general (my dog barks, and every dog I know barks, so probably all dogs bark). The writer and teacher D. Q. McInerny, in his Introduction to Foundational Logic, says this about that child who caught Sloane’s attention:
In the early stages of a child’s development, all appearances indicate that inductive reasoning is the dominant mode of thought…. Inductive reasoning is more rudimentary, more earthy, than deductive reasoning, in the sense that it is the mode of reasoning we commonly employ in our direct encounters with the physical world, the world we first come to know through sense experience.
If as writers we can perceive and present the objects of sense experience as directly as a child instinctively reads them, we are making it possible for others to see past their own personal experience to the general ideas common to all human selves. The images we compose can become symbols of significant meaning. This is what art in any form, traditionally understood, is meant to accomplish, and by conducting us to such simple and constitutive ideas as hope and despair and pain and love, we are given a way to step out beyond our persisting self-reference, a way to exceed ourselves, and to come to understand what is universal, not singular, in the person we perceive ourselves to be. With the elements and techniques of an art, we advance from the closed particular to the open general.
Sloane says that “experiencing a work of fiction through one of its characters is the all-absorbing, self-obliterating joy of reading. It is the core of the child’s experience.” And McInerny says that all those direct encounters a child gathers will later “become the material for forming generalizations about the world.” And so every form of art, including the art of writing, begins as an art of perception, becomes an art of thinking, and can advance even further to an art of contemplation, where at the earthy edge of our own self we might unearth the roots of the universally human. And then from there, where?
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