Art helps,literature may be best

“Unlike the flat data of the internet, books are multidimensional; and they engage and nourish all our mental faculties—our whole selves. There are books that answer the basic impulse of curiosity; and for people of a certain temperament—or perhaps for all of us, if it isn’t stifled—intellectual and imaginative curiosity can be as strong as libidinal desire. In various studies of such things, the urge to know has been shown to be deeply raveled with erotic energies, and following its direction and urgency leads to the best kind of reading. We may want to read a book about the latest discoveries in cosmology, or the latest studies of ant colonies, simply because such things are fascinating, and worth knowing; and because they reawaken our sense of wonder about the world. Or we may want to read a biography of a person we admire, or a history of a period which is of interest to us. Such books not only satisfy our desire for “objective” knowledge, but they give us a wider personal lens through which to view and understand the world, and our own location within it. They literally broaden our mental horizons and our perspective—and there is great enjoyment, as well as an intrinsic value, in that.

But it is imaginative literature—fiction, memoir, personal essays—which provides the fewest pragmatic answers to the question “why read,” and gives us the richest reasons. To make a rather sweeping proposition, imaginative literature is the art form most capable of encompassing all dimensions of human experience: the outer and the inner world, specific facts and the elusive textures of consciousness, the stories of individual selves and of the self within culture and society. Unlike factual texts which, at a pinch, can be summarizedon Wikipedia, fiction and personal writing cannot be so condensed without losing something of their essence.”