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Notebook

Monday, 10th December 2007

Although I was a compulsive reader from the age of six, I was so besotted with movies that one Saturday in Washington, D.C., where I grew up, I saw five movies in a day. It took time and effort and money to see five movies in a day; now, with television and videocassettes and DVDs, the screen has come to the viewer and we are all home communicants.

I don't think anyone has ever found startling the notion that it is not what things are that matter so much as how they are perceived. We perceive sex, say, not as it demonstrably is but as we think it ought to be as carefully distorted for us by the churches and the schools, and by - triumphantly - the movies, which are, finally, the only validation to which that dull anterior world, reality, must submit.

Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation.

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