Comment on The ancient Greeks or Chinese should have already had words for this.
yakko@feddit.uk 3 days agoThe medium of books are qualitatively different from movies. With movies it’s all about the context, the action, the dynamism, the mood. With books, it’s more of a mind meld with the author, and you get richer subtext, connotations, shadings of meaning, and inner monologue.
If you’ve ever seen a movie that tries to hew exactly to a novelistic source (e.g. he Discworld movies), it’s an extremely plodding thing. If you’ve ever read a book that tries to carry a story onwards from a cinematic source (e.g. Star Wars EU), the pacing and treatment feels very different. It’s unavoidable.
It’s unfortunate about aphantasia limiting your enjoyment of books. I wonder if my “1” referring to the chart above limits my involvement with nonfiction and purely conceptual writing.
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
I’m a total and absolute 5 no visualization no inner monologue and I absolutely love fiction.
That guy just doesn’t like fiction. Fiction has plenty of “facts” and events. That make it plenty enjoyable. It’s no different then a nonfiction history book. Just it’s not about earth.
So his lack of visualization has nothing to do with his dislike of fiction.
Be just doesnt like it.
xxd@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Super interesting that you enjoy fiction so much. What I struggle with most is that visual language is often very dense in information, but I can’t do a lot with it. Imagine something like this:
“Light spilled in through the high windows, tinting the hallway into beautiful autumn colors. It looked as if the sunlight was dancing, but of course nothing moved except the dust suspended in the air.”
I would read this and think: cool, I bet this would look amazing if I could see it, but all the information I can actually use from these sentences is “There is a hallway with high windows, it’s maybe morning or evening”. Everything else is either visual or obvious to me. So fiction books are more exhausting, because I constantly filter out things that I can’t really use. It’s like I’m reading a text where a person constantly rambles and can’t get to the damn point. I’m really curious how or why this is different for you? Also, I do think fiction and non-fiction history books are very different. Simply because an author can build and a world, story and characters to convey some deeper meaning or overarching theme, or use strong imagery or metaphores. All of that is more uncommon for historic books from my experience. The above example in a history book would probably look something more like “Orange light entered the hallway through the high windows”.
yakko@feddit.uk 2 days ago
Good to know.
Gosh, have to say there are more aphantasics around than I would have guessed.