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Vermeer was interested in science. He seems to have been one of the first painters to use a camera obscura, and he seems also to have been fascinated by the geometry of the perspectives he created. In the domain of painting he seems to me to have been interested in those matters about which Elaine Scarry (1999) wrote in the domain of prose fiction: how the artist invites the reader—or in this case the viewer—not just to glimpse objects, but to construct scenes.

My view is that in general writers do well to pay attention to John Keats when, in an early statement of the principle of defamiliarization, he wrote that “poetry should surprise by a fine excess.” This goes for prose, too, I think, and even for movie scripts. Conversation in ordinary life functions to maintain and develop the relationship between the conversants. Dialogue in fiction is quite different.

Principally, what makes this lecture series good, is Spurgin’s strong and thoughtful suggestion that reading fiction is an art in something like the way that writing fiction is an art. He introduces what he calls a set of tools that can be used by the reader to think about a piece of fiction during reading.

The first keynote speaker in Utrecht will be Gerry Cupchik, who has worked for many years in psychological aesthetics, studying visual and literary art. In an interesting recent paper with Michelle Hilsher (Hilsher & Cupchik, 2005) the researchers compared responses to poetry presented in three different ways. They found that people preferred to read poetry themselves rather than to listen to it, to hear it, or to see it performed, because in reading they were better able to explore and interpret literary devices in an independent and creative manner.

I started to think of my own writing of fiction in a comparable way. I need a certain amount of quiet, a room of my own, a mental state in which my own concerns are not too pressing, and then in my writing I can enter into the life of a literary character about whom I am writing. In doing this, I think I become better able to understand both others and myself. I can’t always achieve a state of apartness but, when I can, the idea of putting aside my own concerns and entering reflectively into the life of another seems an apt description. I can sometimes lose myself in a novel or short story I am writing. In Eastern meditation, thoughts are allowed to enter and move through the mind without one becoming attached to them. Writing isn’t non-attachment. Instead, thoughts of a certain kind, for instance those of a character in a novel can become central. They are pursued, expanded, and can find their way onto the page.

The most important new book I read last year was Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better. It shows how, once a nation has reached a certain level of income among its citizens (which Europe and North America have reached but which most Third-World countries have not), it’s not the absolute level of average national income that predicts health and well-being. It’s difference in income within the society: not economics but psychology.

Because of a cloud of volcanic ash, I was marooned in Europe for eight days. To start with, I was in Helsinki, where the cloud seemed determined to hover indefinitely. After difficulties in buying tickets—please take a number—I travelled by ferry and by train to Paris. Arrival there was a relief because it was nearer home. While I was there I thought I would make a little pilgrimage to places where Marcel Proust had lived.

A love story on a grand scale, Therefore Choose is set in a world where a single choice can affect the direction of a life, a country, or even a continent. Facing decisions that will forever alter the course of their lives, George, Anna, and Werner must choose and live with the irrevocable consequences.

I would like to be home in Toronto for the publication of my book but, due to a cloud of volcanic ash, I am involuntarily confined to Europe at least until the weekend.

Fiction enables us to overcome the actor-observer discrepancy, to understand from the position of being inside someone how that person might act in a particular situation. The way I have put it is that in planning and acting in our own lives we use an aspect of our mind that I’ve called the planning processor. With it, we use our knowledge of how the world works to understand the effects of possible actions and, as we pursue our goals, we can thus plan what to do. When we read fiction and identify with a protagonist, we enter mentally into a quiet space and put aside our own goals.

mong the interesting results of this approach is the finding by Kate McLean (2006) that in adolescence people stop thinking of themselves in terms of what they like and dislike (”my favorite colour is yellow, and I don’t like pizza”) and start thinking of themselves in terms of a story of their actions and the outcomes of these actions extended in time.