As tools? No.
=Inez Haynes Irwin=: I would say _yes_ to all these questions. I enjoy
fiction intensely. All my life I have been the easy prey of fiction
writers. Allowing that sometimes the mind gets fatigued and ceases to
register impressions (although I do not remember ever to have had this
experience) I would say that I saw, heard, tasted, smelled and felt all
the things the author wanted me to see, hear, taste, smell and feel. I
do seem in imagination actually to feel physical pain when the author
wishes me to do so. Recently while suffering from an attack of grippe I
had to stop reading a novel, Dorothy Speare's _Dancers in the Dark_,
because the opening chapters described the fatigue of a group of girls
who had danced all night. Their fatigue added so much to my weakness
that I could not go on with the story. I remember once reading an essay
by John Burroughs on _The Apple_. When I had finished it, I had to go
out and buy an apple to eat, although ordinarily I don't care for
apples.
I am particularly susceptible to color in writing; and I find that I
enjoy particularly the work of those writers who have studied art or
have been artists. Du Maurier's books were a great joy to me and if
Hergesheimer had nothing else to interest me, I think I should read him
for the wonderful color arrangements in his descriptions. _Java Head_ is
remarkable in this respect. Robert Chambers has some of this color
quality too; so, of course, to an extraordinary degree, has Conrad.
The pictures I see in my imagination are always colored as the author
directs me to color them.
I do not think details are blurred in my imagined version of the
author's picture--except when I have read too hurriedly or skipped.
I have studied arithmetic, algebra, plane geometry and solid geometry.
The higher the mathematics the better I liked it. I was exceptionally
stupid in arithmetic but I enjoyed plane and solid geometry enormously.
It appealed to my imagination.
I am not quite sure that I understand what this question means. Of
course highly imaginative writers--especially if they have the great
technical gift of connotative writing--can start your imagination with a
broken phrase, can keep it working long after their words have stopped.
It is as though they left echoes in one's mind. I think H. G. Wells
makes this magic in my mind more often than any other writer that I
know. Although I am half inclined to say that Henry James--who can also
involve me in a maze of obscurity--is his equal if not his superior in
this respect.