Prosper Buranelli: The chief pleasure I get from a story is an intellectual gratification, the perception of some irony, the astonishment which comes from some development, unusual with respect to current ideas, but reasonable when submitted to clear thinking. A good story to my mind is a piece of thinking, of rational building up. I see in Anatole France's Procurator of Judea a rigorous deduction of what could have happened under the circumstances. The seeming truth of the colors and sounds of the setting has for its purpose the heightening of the plausibility with which the close is reasoned out. It is much like the paleontologist who builds the idea of an animal by reasoning on a couple of bones and a set of tracks in prehistoric mud. I am never absorbed, save by the author's ideation.
I can see things with my eyes shut, but don't, often. I have an "ear mind." I hear things. My imaginings take place in words or in music. In adolescence I saw things, but not now. Solid geometry and spherical trigonometry trouble me. I have enough trouble constructing, in phantasy, in two dimensions.
If the concepts are disposed in provocative arrangement, I can supply the vestments, at least such as I need. But the fuller and more persuasive the coloring, the more powerful the logic of the concepts. If an author places a civilized man among cannibals and carries him through well analyzed mental processes to cannibalism, it will be all the more plausible if he complete his reasoning with fully colored and convincing pictures.
Any story which either gives or suggests stock pictures, such as cowboys or village churches, save in most acrid mockery, is to my mind immeasurably rotten.
In the best stories, I think, reading one and writing one would be much alike. Reading a beautifully reasoned story would be much like writing a beautifully reasoned story. If you watch a very well played game of chess, it is like playing along with the player. It is something like playing the game yourself. You know what is in the player's head, why he makes a move. With bad players playing, it is merely a spectacle. You can't tell what they are about most of the time and, when you can, you are entirely out of sympathy with the rational processes, which, you understand, are contemptible.
Tools of trade, presumably text-books and other forms of instruction, I have found, are useful, but only if they give you bases upon which to erect further meditations of your own.
Thompson Burtis: My imagination causes me to react to all the stimuli you mention if the writer has any vividness at all about his writing. I taste the flavors, sniff the odors, feel pain, etc. I will except none of the cases mentioned. Perhaps my reaction to the description of good or bad food is the strongest. I can get hungry at the mention of a delightful meal, and mentally nauseated, so to speak, at a description of bad food on shipboard or something like that.
In the pictures I see with my eyes shut most details are blurred. Most often the pictures are black and white, but in especially vivid cases, such as a tropic night or something of that sort, my mental pictures are in color. The limitations are usually in the case of scenes with which I am totally unfamiliar, and because of the number of unfamiliar details mentioned I am often totally at sea in an attempt to visualize a scene or a happening.
Yes, solid geometry did.
My response is not limited to the exact degree of the author's vividness, but it is affected by his descriptive power. A mere concept will make me see something, but not as much as a good description would.