Personally I have to exercise a lot of agency in reading, and understanding what I read, and bearing it all in mind for long enough to make sense of the book as I go along. In no sense does it feel like a passive process by which beauty is transmitted to me without my involvement; it feels like an active effort, of which an experience of beauty is the constructed result. But, I think more importantly, great novels engage my sympathies and make me desire things. When I look at the ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’, I don’t ‘want’ anything from it. The pleasure is in seeing it as it is. But when I read
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