Jeremy J Wayne Thank you for including me on that marvelous list of ppl Well in a sense you _have_ read those books and more.
If you think about it, if one is paying attention when writing that is, a single sentence can compress all of one’s knowledge into a very short space. That knowledge is comprised of all the things that person has read, experienced, thought, believed.
So with each thoughtful person you interact with, you’re gaining decades of knowledge in short nuggets, when they are “good sentences”. I call it “perfect words”. I’m always searching for the perfect words.. either to write… or to notice when I find them so I can save them.
If you are 9 yrs old and an avid TV watcher, you’ve absorbed, in compressed form, the knowledge and wisdom (however one may all it) of every writer for every show…and in the actor’s body movements and words and reactions (or the intonations of the voice actor’s voice – if it’s a cartoon)… and all that ccompressed wisdom forms new thought patterns in young brains.
And there’s more – Living vicariously through various characters, a child who is 9 yrs old (I use as an example because my ne just turned ten) – will have literally experienced many lifetimes, through the experiences of the fictional characters in their shows.
They’ve experienced love and death 10,000 times, the nature of friendship, models on how to be and how to think and what to do and who to be… all the while comparing this against what they already know to be true, deciding what to absorb, what to put aside and what to simply ponder.
Think how much more that’s true of us. How many thousands of years old are we each?