Ray Bradbury once wrote, “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” This is incredibly true, but writing can do much more than allow us to cope with reality. Authors provide escapism, education and emotional fluidity, all of which create and improve the human experience. Because of these reasons, the role of ‘author’ is an essential one.
Authors provide a sense of escapism in a reality that would rather we become bitter. Work, grades, parents, time. It all doesn’t matter when we’re reading. We’re able to get lost in books like nothing else because the words we’re reading create a mental movie. It occupies our entire mind.
Wordsalive.org explains just how reading engages the human mind, stating “This allows the reader to simultaneously imagine whole new worlds as the words on the page slowly piece it together for them. Also mentioned in the OEDB article, our brain doesn’t make a distinction between reading about an experience and actually living it. The same neurological regions are stimulated despite if it is a real experience, or just reading about one.”
Thus, reading is a fantastic way to escape daily problems because it’s such a powerful distraction.
Reading also develops human emotion, as well as imagination. Because of how powerfully we attach to stories, we feel what the author wants us to feel. The same article by wordsalive.org analyzes this matter, stating “Literature can destabilize personality by enabling the reader to empathize through the ups and downs of the plot. This can, in turn, allow the reader to open up to their own inner experiences.”
This is why authors create emotional fluidity. By making us feel the emotions of others, it lets us experience our own more purely.
Finally, the authors allow us more access to education. It’s no secret that books have always been crucial to learning. Textbooks, workbooks and non-fiction novels educate us on a wide variety of subjects. As stated earlier, books engage the mind in a powerful way through imagination, but they also do so through intellect. Selfdevelopmentsecrets.com says that reading “sharpens your mind through stimulation of the brain. By causing you to focus intensely on the words, your brain takes in a significant amount of information, which can improve both your critical thinking and analyzation skills as well. This stimulation is healthy for your mind and the sharpening of your thought processes.”
Furthermore, reading is critical to language and vocabulary development, particularly in children but also in adults. Selfdevelopmentsecrets.com also discusses this, “Well, after several days of reading and looking up new words you don’t understand, your vocabulary will begin to expand one word at a time. Words and phrases, if you read every day, fill your brain with a new vocabulary that you might never have learned without reading.”
It’s for these reasons that authors are so incredibly important to all things intellectual and imaginative. Without authors, we couldn’t escape through novels, providing a crucial moment of peace in a hectic world. We wouldn’t be able to empathize and sympathize with characters and in turn ourselves and others. We also could not and would not learn as effectively as we do now. Without authors, life as we know it would cease to exist. This is why authors are critical to the human experience.
Anastasia Smith, Features Editor
smithan18@bonaventure.edu
