Simon's new blog, The Cluttered Desk, talks about how people in your head when you read are composites of people you know.
It's true - it reminds me of how I read somewhere that one theory of dreaming is that all of the people you meet when wandering around in your dreams are really you. Ocassionally in a vaguely lucid dream, you can become aware of this, which makes weird dreams even weirder... But on some level, this makes sense - for instance, while you think you are talking to your Wife, you're really talking to the way you imagine your Wife to be - it's not like she's actually in your head...
Reading is similar to dreaming in that respect. The late Kurt Vonnegut, in his last interview, said of reading that he thought reading was a difficult task. If you could do it right, you could be transported to the murky waters of the Atlantic with Herman Melville, or a deserted tropical island with Defoe.
But if you couldn't do it, I guess there's always TV, right?
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