What We See When We Read

“A proposition is a picture of reality.

A proposition is a model of reality as we imagine it.”

—Ludwig Wittgenstein,

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“I don’t think I shall ever forget my first sight of Hercule Poirot. Of course, I got used to him later on, but to begin with it was a shock … I don’t know what I’d imagined … Of course, I knew he was a foreigner, but I hadn’t expected him to be quite as foreign as he was, if you know what I mean. When you saw him you just wanted to laugh! He was like something on the stage or at the pictures.”

—Agatha Christie,

Murder in Mesopotamia

“Writing … is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all; so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.”

—Laurence Sterne,

The Life and Opinions of

Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“The fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do, deceiving elf.”

—John Keats,

“Ode to a Nightingale”