"Interestingly, a good novel likewise pulls me from myself. But it does so in a completely different way. A good novel brings me up against, or into, a fully imagined otherness. A single—transitive—otherness. I read about Prince Andrei dying on the battlefield and I am sharpened inside myself. I am given a single measure of experience and I hold it alongside mine, and when I mark the page and close the covers I am as full of singular existing as I have ever been. I have not found that, even a hint of it, in my online reading. I think it’s because the one reading encounter directs me into myself, the other sends me outward in widening spirals. Which is not always unpleasant—it’s just not gratifying from the point of view of these ultimates I invoke for myself."
— Sven Birkerts, online vs offline reading experiences.
