Thursday, April 30, 2026
When you read, words turn into images in your mind and thought process begins that awakens senses and feelings. Two-dimensional pages conjure three-dimensional realities. You become absorbed in the sensory experience of an unfamiliar world. Mentally out of your body you temporarily live subliminally the book’s protagonist’s life. Events seem real as you shed tears, smile, laugh, or feel heartache. Hours fly by as you experience pleasure or pain or loads of other emotions from an artistic distance.
At times it so happens that a sudden call, a noise, a smell catapults you out of your imaginary orbit and back to your armchair. How you wish that had not happened! Reading can be that fantastic. And so much more. “Much more” for me is when absorbed reading persuades me to actualize what I have read, coaxing me to adventure into the setting of the book, this time myself as the protagonist.
This happened to me twice!
By 2007, I had read as much as I could about ancient Egyptian art and architecture. But had not experienced it. My husband and I decided to visit the country that I had only vicariously felt. We took a flight to Cairo and from there a river cruise over Nile from Luxor to Aswan. Charmed by its monuments, its culture and its people two years later we made our second trip to the country, this time including Alexandria to our itinerary.
Again in 2019 I read, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West.
A compilation of daily records of Lewis and Clark’s journey, (these were Lewis’s journals), journals underlined. They followed no grammar, punctuation or spelling rules, and were hard to read. Yet as I read, I could see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the time span from August 1803 through September 1806 during which Lewis and Clark adventured uncharted land west of the Mississippi River. Populated with Native Indian tribes, the frontier was mostly wilderness, high mountains, vast prairies, wide rivers, and flora and fauna unknown to zoologists and botanists of the time. North America before 1803 was a mind-boggling reality of wilderness and of Native Indian life.
Reading those journals wowed me! The feeling was so intense that once again I persuaded my husband for us to follow Lewis and Clark’s voyage of discovery and adventure. So in May 2020 we left for a two-week adventure—but ours was in a luxurious ship. This time it was our tour guide with his stories based on facts and us surrounded with real historic settings. He talked about Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea (the young Native American woman), her baby boy, and thirty young military men. As we voyaged we felt we were traveling with them.
Only because of the magic of reading was I able to vicariously enjoy the company of these exemplary explorers and one brave woman. The book had conjured up pristine images of people and places and during our travel the actual settings filled us with awe, allure, mystery, and romance while the characters came alive in our imagination.