immersion

Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement.

As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too.

He had learned how reading a book can take you away from anywhere, and make you feel like you're somewhere else, and someone else.. Even if only for a little while.

_ I studied the painting that hangs over the small fireplace. Immerse myself in art, I told myself. Immerse myself in the conversation of those strollers, people who seem to move about more comfortably in their early-evening twilight than I do, people of maybe sixty years ago.

The soul accepts the mystery within and all around, immersing itself in it, celebrating it.

Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won__ hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, __ll right, it__ just fear, I don__ have to let it control me. I see it for what it is".

From the earliest days, videogame players were less interested in winning than in going to a new psychic place where things were always a bit different, but always the same. The gambler and the videogame player share a life of contradiction; you are overwhelmed, and so you disappear into the game.

The fish does not know it is wet. America is immersed in violence. The violence is in our souls. The enemy is within.

Although this was not a comforting point of view, he did not reject it, because it coincided with one of his basic beliefs: that a man must at all costs keep some part of himself outside and beyond life. If he should ever for an instant cease doubting, accept wholly the truth of what his senses conveyed to him, he would be dislodged from the solid ground to which he clung and swept along with the current, having lost all objective sense, totally involved with existence.

I thought it peculiar how one new experience can alter your perspective on places you've known your whole life.