there is a relationship between novels and what for want of a better phrase you might call our spiritual lives. Some of us read them for comfort, or to escape; some to learn about the world; some because it’s a rare chance for concentrated solitude, to be neither working nor passively consuming the content of a screen but thinking deeply about experiences other than our own using some of the tools of our dream life, and listening carefully to the voices of others, in ways that ask for our imaginative participation and that might also shed light upon our own experiences of being alive on this
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