Literature is a means by which we know ourselves. By it we meet 1. ______
future selves, and recognize past selves; against it we match our present self.
Its primary function is to validate and re-create the self in all its individuality
and distinctness. In doing so, it cements a sense of relationship between the
serf and the otherness of the book, and allows us a notion of ourselves as
sociable. Its shared knowledge is vicarious experience; by this means we
enlarge our understandings of what it means to be human, of the corporate 2. ______
and independent nature of human society. The act of reading the book marks 3. ______
both our difference in and our place in the human fabric. The more we read, 4. ______
the more we are. In the act of reading silently we are alone from the book, 5. ______
separate from one’s own immediate surroundings. Yet in the act of reading 6. ______
we enter other minds and other places, enlarge our dialogue with the world. 7. ______
Thus paradoxically, while disengaging from the immediate we are increasing
its scope. In silence, reading activates a deeply creative function of consciousness.
We are deeply committed to the narrative which we coexist while 8. ______
engaged in reading. All kinds of present physical discomfort ness may be 9. ______
unnoticed while we are reading, and actual time is replaced by narrative time.
To imaginatively enter a fictional world by reading it is then both a liberation 10. _____
from self and an expansion of self.