| First off, if you enjoy movies, then you're already appreciating art. That's fantastic. That's all you need to do: find an art you enjoy participating in, and do it. That's the trick: you're participating. Movies are easy to participate in: they're very engrossing and they pass by literally even if you fall asleep. But you can also devote your life to them: learning how they're made, comparing and contrasting them, writing about them, etc. That's not better or worse, just another form of participation. A book can also invite more or less participation. The type of prose you're talking about there doesn't do much for me: the metaphors are all over the place, and so they don't add up to any more than the sum of the parts (or even less). Some do feel like they are intricate jewelry boxes, which you can engage with either as a whole or by looking deeply into the parts. Again, either way is fine: it's like the difference between writing a video game and playing one. Don't worry that some forms are presented as "highbrow". That's irrelevant. It rewards what rich people like. Which can be great: they've got the time to spend looking at it. But the idea that it's inherently superior because of that, that's just gatekeeping douchenozzlery. The same kind as you get in comic books or sci fi or anything else where some prestigious people get to declare that they've got the only kind that matters. The nice thing about this essay is that it's short. You can read it a few times and see if pieces of it engage you. You can talk about why some of the phrases were written the way they were; you can hold that discussion right here as an impromptu book club. That's the really important thing: not the "colorful part of life" that you're missing, but the chance to bond over it with others. If that's not for you, you're not missing anything at all. |