To Tolstoy, art is feelings; the transmission of feelings; a communications protocol written in the language of feelings. Everybody knows that letters are just shapes, that serifs are pointless, and that the spaces between words are mere emptiness. But books still produce tears and adrenaline. When people read, they hear voices and see images in their head. This production is total synesthesia and something close to madness. A great book is a hallucinated IMAX film for one. The author had a feeling, which he turned into words, and the reader gets a feeling from those words—maybe it’s the same
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