A Memory You Never Had
Why a novel stays with you and a TV show doesn’t
The claim that picking up a novel is a better form of entertainment than turning on the TV is probably (hopefully) a trivial one.
But why is this? What is it about the book that elevates it and leaves the TV in the dust? Both media offer stories that can go on for hours. Why does it feel like getting a story from a book is somehow nobler than getting the same story from the TV?
I think the reason lies in the particular way that we must engage with the book to enjoy it.
To watch something on the TV is effortless and passive in the truest sense of the word. You just have to be conscious. That is about it. The TV does the rest.
But this won’t do for a novel. It does not hand you the entertainment ready-made. Rather, it provides the raw material, and you have to put in the work of holding and imagining the story unfold in your mind. The words on the page become entertaining only through the activity of your mind.
But using one’s imagination takes effort. It does not happen automatically. Although you may get absorbed by a book and get carried away to a point where it feels automatic, the first moments require some tensing of the mind. You do not sit back passively and absorb, like a sponge. You engage actively; you put your mind to it.
To some, this may be reason enough. One option is easier and therefore lazy, so the other one is automatically better.
I don’t buy this line of reasoning. Although valuable things are often hard, hard things need not be valuable. For example, you could make watching TV significantly harder by setting it to a foreign language without subtitles. Following the plot will require more effort, but I doubt it is worthwhile.
Instead, I consider reading superior due to the particular activity the mind engages in to create those mental images that support the story of the pages. The mind imagines things that do not exist. Using no more than words on a page, it creates a vivid mental universe that we live in for the length of those pages.
The special thing about those purely mental images is that they stay with us for much longer than those we have merely been shown on the TV. The effort we invest in imagining the story unfold creates an imprint quite similar to a memory. So we experience the events more deeply.
I can recall scenes from books I have read years ago, and they continue to evoke whatever emotions I felt when reading and visualizing them. Is this not amazing? That a novel can create a lasting memory—almost as if I experienced the story first-hand.
Nothing I have ever watched on the TV comes remotely close to this. I watch it, I enjoy it, I even get fairly invested in it (I cannot even reply to a text when watching TV without pausing the show, so absorbed am I more often than not). But it does not stay with me beyond the immediate experience. It does not afford me the chance to feel like I lived the story. With the TV I am always a spectator.
I think this is the key difference. Because the book provides merely the raw material that we then use to imagine the story, it affects us in a similar way as visualization exercises. And some visualization-adherents claim that the mind and body cannot distinguish between real memories and imaginary ones; that therein lies the power of visualization.
If there is a grain of truth to this, then a novel can offer us the chance to experience the story as if we were there, whereas the TV will always demote us to a bystander. And by experiencing the story as if we were there, it becomes part of us. We learn from it. We take the experience with us. We add the experience to the sum of experiences that make up our psychology. The novel, its characters, and its events become part of us.