At first, the thrill of our own brand-new [reading] expertise is all we ask or expect from Dick and Jane. But soon we begin to ask what else those marks on the page can give us. We begin to want information, entertainment, invention, even truth and beauty. We concentrate, we skim, we skip words, put down the book and daydream, start over, and reread. We finish a book and return to it years later to see what we might have missed, or the ways in which time and age have affected our understanding.
—Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
There are things that books can do better than anything else. While a good movie can give us information, entertainment, invention, and even truth and beauty, the way in which we interact with a book can make it deeper and more meaningful.
When we’re watching a movie, we can’t simply take our eyes off the screen for a few seconds or a few minutes and ponder what we just read or daydream about how a certain sentence fits or sums up our life so perfectly, we can’t easily re-watch a few seconds of a movie as many times as we like to try to extract even more out of it or to laugh once again at a funny part or make that heartbreaking part drive that dagger into our heart just a little deeper. Movies—even for those of us like me who are constantly analyzing and thinking about what we’re seeing—rely much more on a constant stream of information, with much less time to process and savor it.
And while it’s certainly possible to re-watch a movie every few years (and there are several that I do), movies don’t seem to have quite the same mutability as books do. They don’t grow as much with us as a book does. The Great Gatsby I re-read last year was so much different than the one I first read in high school. The poems of Pablo Neruda are never the same. Books change as we change, whereas movies seem to give us more of the same feeling we had when we first saw them.
Last week: Robert Frost gets teary-eyed.
Next week: Gary Lutz on what makes a beautiful sentence beautiful.
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