Breathing

I couldn't sleep last night so I got up and made some coffee and toast and grabbed my book, curled up on the couch and dove in. Right now I am reading Reading Lolita In Tehran, by Azar Nafisi. The author is so compelling and realistic and passionate, so very inspiring and motivated. She wrote, in reference to the novel:
"A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all, class dismissed."
On closer inspection, it seems to me, if reading is inhaling another world, art is exhaling your world for others to inhale, a process of breathing. Literature, thoughts which form from the imagination are art. Creating a world that others can enter and at some level understand a writer's world or point of view has got to be one of the most artistic endeavors at our finger tips. Again, a related subject, I have been thinking how sad it is that art has been phased out of the public schools. In high school, art and English were the only two subjects that got me through the day. They made math, German and Economics bearable. But, then again, it's all connected, it's just having those few subjects that a person can be passionate about that provide the energy to work through the rest of the less energizing subjects. After all, if we didn't have science, we couldn't understand the neuron impulses that pass between neurons in the brain which carry our thoughts, which create inspiration and innovation. If we did not have art or literature, how could we express the ideas and insights that spontaneously combust during every day life. The math needs the art to dream up a colluseum, needs the science to understand structural support, needs the history to stylize the details and period-specific references, needs the psychology to understand where the ideas are coming from... it's all connected.