Tick tock tick tock

It always amazes me the number of different things that make people "tick"! Not just in relationships, either with the opposite sex or in friendships, or on a physical/mental attraction level, but in general. How some people love sport, some music, some danger, some science, some art, some philosophy, and so on and so on. And how even if you find a group of art lovers, within that group will be impressionists, and modernists, and traditionalists, and so on and so on. And then within each differing style each person will prefer individual artists, and even within similar artist appreciators there will be a variance on which particular piece of art is the most enjoyed!

And when you break all these things down to an individual piece of art, or song, or poem, or experiment, or sport manouevre, or type of person, and then multiply that by the many, many things we encounter in each day, and the many many things that we have a preference on, it really is almost mind-blowing to imagine the extent of differences between people. Sometimes, when I think about the capacity of difference within each human brain, it seriously, seriously astounds me the extent to which we are all entirely different!! Not only physically, but mentally too.

We all have so many million facets to our personalities that make up the individual that we are, and yet, in many ways we are all broad brush strokes of humanity and are united by exactly how similar we are! Despite the many differences we have in what we enjoy and hate and what we desire and detest, we are pretty much all fundamentally looking for the same things in life. Albeit in varying differing packages. And that is really something positively amazing!

Anyway, I seem to have gone off on a bit of a random philosophical tangent, so back to the original reason for my post this evening...! I have posted, read, and listened to a lot of songs in the last little while, and also often have quite a few discussions with varying friends for whom music is an extremely important part of their life. This is good. I like music! But that said, if I had to choose only one thing to keep in the arts, the thing I would not be able to do without, the thing that I would trade for music anytime, anyplace, anywhere is literature!

Quite simply, although I like music, I absolutely adore books! Everything about them!! The pages, the front cover, the pristine crispness of a new book, the dank agedness of an old well thumbed book, just everything! And I will read pretty much anything, dependent on my mood, although like anybody I have genres that don't interest me as much as others. That's only natural and part of the wonder of the human race!

For me, there is absolutely nothing like picking up a book and finding yourself absorbed in somebody else's life for a short while. It is all encompassing. And despite the fact that any book is completely scripted, and that it can only ever be the author's view and vision that is expressed, literature allows for such individualisation and personalisation of the content that in a way everybody reads a different story. And that is something that is missing with television, films and theatre (much as I also loving the theatre!).

There is such little room for your own imagination and interpretation when you are watching a story unfold before you, with ready presented characters and scenery and sounds, that it is much harder to extract your own interpretation of the authors work. And it's a beautiful thing to be able to be so involved but so removed in somebody else's thoughts, and to be able to appreciate the beauty and significance of language and emotion. It is what makes literature special for me in a way that no other "art" can compete with, and why I thought I would give the heads up to the good old novel for a change.

It's also the reason I need more bloody shelves!!