Making art out of knowledge

I've been thinking about what differs a book from something shorter like a blogpost or an essay. It can't be just the length, because if you'd simply put together 50 blogposts and read them after one and another it would still be a whole other experience than reading a book. The appeal of many good books, both fiction (maybe mostly the more biographical and personal ones) and non-fiction, is getting into the head of the author. When you read a book, you think someone else's thoughts. If being yourself as a person means having your own ideas and thoughts, reading a book is becoming the author for a while, because your head gets filled with their thoughts instead of yours.

Art can be either artifice or realism - which means, it can be created either by planning, thought and design, or by transfering an experience you've had in real life through the work.

If a love song is about experiencing someone else's emotions of true love distilled into a product, reading a great non-fiction book is experiencing someone else's experience of intellectual joy and struggle distilled into a product. When I read Henri Bergson's book "Laughter", I get new information from it, but most of all I get to re-experience Henri Bergson's own experience of putting one and one together, going through the ideas in his head, getting that sudden realization that made the mess of various thoughts turn into a clear elegant theory. It's that experience of upgrading your worldview, following your curiosity and challenging your thoughts, made into a book. It's knowledge becoming art.

That's what differs a book from a blogpost or something shorter in general. It's technically the same thing, you read words in different amounts, but at a certain amount, and when it's all connected and not just loose chapters about different things written in different voices, you get in the author's head and experience what they experienced, while reading fewer words mostly gives you new ideas on top of your current ones without getting out of yourself at all.

Different artforms are good for different things. Music is powerful because it's so tightly connected to someone's emotions, and books are powerful because they're connected to someone's intellect. You wouldn't experience love by reading a non-fiction book about it, and you wouldn't experience intellectual joys and struggles by listening to a song about it. Music is emotional, and books are intellectual, even if they both include the other in a smaller way, and artforms like movies and video games are hybrids that both use the dynamical rhythmical structure of music (like in the editing of an intense action scene, something in that is very similar to music) that so well transfers raw emotion, as well as the intellectual sensibilities of story, characters and ideas from the literary world. What further distinguishes different artforms from each other is their level of creator control vs user interaction (with linear time-based forms like movies and music on one side and video games and other interactive forms on the other side). And probably something more, but hey, I almost managed to shoehorn in my whole artform "framework" into this post initially meant to be only about reading Henri Bergson's brilliant book on comedy and its role in society and its relation to art and nature.

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