Vocal Transfusion

My sister sent me for Christmas a wonderful novel--Dirt Music by Timothy Winton. It takes place in Western Australia, a huge state roughly the entire western third of that red continent. Having just been there this year for the third or fourth time, the Aussie vernacular rang fresh. The amazing lyrical quality of the prose amplified the strong musical descriptions. You could taste the words, roll them on your tongue, it was delicious.
Isn't it wonderful how for the length of a good book, one enters fully into the skin of a person completely outside of ourselves, not the author exactly, perhaps that of the narrator born of the author's effort? After Dirt Music I found myself describing the essence of the air around me, that air seemed dense with substance, with its own music and poetry, at times discordant, other times achingly sweet, heavy with possibility.
I swapped that book with Alison for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by mark Haddon. And entirely different sort of book, it was written in the voice of an autistic teenager. It too has transfused its voice into me. It heightened my awareness of the overwhelming quantity of messages around us--lights, signs, facial expressions, noise patterned and random. I started to describe events in long sentences chaining strands of "and then this and then that." A friend recently told me of his uncle's passing, an uncle who in today's lingo would be developmentally disabled, but who often humorously surprised his family with his very perceptive understanding of what was going on around him.
Powerful the words that allow us to live other possibilities and heighten our senses.