You and what's real

What's real? Was it Berkeley who illustrated this by kicking a stone? No, real is not add-up-five-sense-impressions real. Kant said we can only perceive reality through our senses, we can never know any 'thing' in and of itself: the Ding An Zich. Real has got to be somewhere between the world outside and the world inside -- the porous interface and interplay between your interior and your exterior, the construction of the out-there by your imagination. We each have our own real, our own infraction. I know, for example, that I think about sex more than any man alive, so my real is pickled differently from yours. Do women have a real more in common with themselves than men with themselves? Is there a gendered real? For example, how men experience a vagina, and how women experience a penis, has got to be different from how the genders experience their own organs. (Didn't I tell you I think about sex more than you do? Now do you believe me?) I love great novels, because they put forth the real of the other in a more bracing, and yes, novel way, than most other forms of art. Music just moons away in your ears, a soundtrack to your thoughts. A painting merely floods the eyes. A film envelops and is soon over. But a novel, 500 pages of words, now there is another reality, one you engage with for hours. Some novelists make realities more different from others. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers is more different from other novels than they are from themselves. So is Nabokov's Lolita. A novel is more than real: it's a kick-off point, it boots the real into the sky, for your mind to soar along.