In Steven Pinker's wonderful ode to language, ''The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language," he argues that the ability [translate squiggles on a page into human experience] is hard-wired; he also describes the fact of reading with rhapsodic simplicity: It is a wonder of the natural world in which ''we can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision." Whether willful or unconscious, this surrender, I contend, is an ordinary miracle as integral as breathing. If music is the purest art form, literature, in its articulation of the near-infinite, is the most abundant.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:30 AM  |