Running up and down your arms, just beneath the surface of your skin, amid the veins, glands, arteries, vessels, and nerves, there is a smooth thin muscle gripping the bottom of each hair. It is called the arrector pili muscle, and it is activated by the sympathetic nervous system. This means you cannot control it, or flex it impressively on cue, like a bicep.
Instead, something outside of the body must summon the arrector pili to attention. For example, if a furry animal feels the chill of cold air, the muscles pull back and make thousands of hairs come up all at once in a follicular standing ovation. These upright hairs trap warm air near the surface of the skin to build a thin atmosphere around the body. A strong emotion, like terror, can trigger the same warming reflex.
Hominids were hairier once. Now most of our furriness is gone. But the muscles remain, and so do their reflexes. When we feel cold, feverish, or deeply emotional, our hairs pucker up and create a raw and lumpy texture along the skin, like a freshly plucked bird. People around the world have named the effect after various fowl. In Chinese, they call it “lumps on chicken skin.” In Hebrew, they say “duck skin.” In English, they’re called “goose bumps.”
A few years ago, at a college reunion, I was walking through the south stretch of campus on a golden fall day in Evanston, Illinois, and I suddenly felt an urge to listen to songs by Jeff Buckley. I hadn’t heard Buckley in many years, perhaps since graduation. Most famous for his lovely and widely mimicked cover of “Hallelujah,” he recorded only one major album before he died in a drowning accident. I had this album on loop the entire summer of 2004, into my September preorientation, and through my first month of college.
Replaying his music nine years later, it was like opening a time capsule and watching its treasures react to fresh oxygen. Inside the songs, there lived the memories of my first college crush, the anxiety of my first journalism class, and my first four a.m. political debate in the study area with blue felt couches, the aroma of chemically buttered microwave popcorn, and the alarmingly sticky floors. But the song also held the conclusions to these anxieties—the knowledge of a failed romance, a magazine job I loved, and the fact that my four a.m. friend was about to get married.
Walking around the campus and hearing the music playing within the memories, or the memories playing within the music, the song triggered an ancient hominid response. I got the chills. A feeling slipped beneath the skin and yanked a thousand little muscles, and there I was, walking around my old stomping grounds, covered in goose bumps.
“Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty or God,” Leo Tolstoy wrote in a small (for Tolstoy) 1897 book, What Is Art? He continued:
It is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.
To Tolstoy, art is feelings; the transmission of feelings; a communications protocol written in the language of feelings. Everybody knows that letters are just shapes, that serifs are pointless, and that the spaces between words are mere emptiness. But books still produce tears and adrenaline. When people read, they hear voices and see images in their head. This production is total synesthesia and something close to madness. A great book is a hallucinated IMAX film for one. The author had a feeling, which he turned into words, and the reader gets a feeling from those words—maybe it’s the same feeling; maybe it’s not. As Peter Mendelsund wrote in What We See When We Read, a book is a coproduction. A reader both performs the book and attends the performance. She is conductor, orchestra, and audience. A book, whether nonfiction or fiction, is an “invitation to daydream.”20
When I started daydreaming about this book, I spent a lot of time talking to psychologists about fluency—ease of thinking. But as I reflected on my own favorite books and songs and movies, I came to see that what I like most aren’t the easy things, but rather the reward that something difficult has become comprehensible.
These aha moments are not just the sensation of easy thinking. They are the ecstasy that comes from the work of figuring something out. I have loved Shakespeare’s plays since I was too young to understand the words. Hamlet is one of the few books I have on my desk—an excruciating cliché for any visitor, but there it is. My devotion to Shakespeare is such that I would never include an observation about hits that did not first apply to him: His source material is familiar, but his style was an innovation, a mixture of aphoristic poetry and low humor that is, as Ben Jonson wrote, “not of an age, but for all time!” Shakespeare had few original plots. He was, like George Lucas in the next chapter, a master assembler of old allusions. Even Hamlet is both singular and derivative; he’s based on a thirteenth-century Norse myth, Amleth. The play is confounding, and maddeningly ambiguous, but the few answers that it yields are, for me, the finest kind. They offer a heightened version of the language that I use to think about the world. My thoughts move through the play the way sound moves through a bullhorn, starting life-size and finishing with new volume. “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space,” Hamlet says. I have sometimes felt this way about the play: It would be all right if literature were confined exclusively to Hamlet. It is infinite enough.
All of my favorite books perform this trick. Initially, they seem to immerse me in another life, but ultimately they immerse me in me; I am looking through the window into another person’s home, but it is my face that I see in the reflection. I imagine, but can never be sure, that everybody feels the same way about books. Tolstoy did. Art is the universal window, he said, a collective view into “the oneness of life’s joys and sorrows.”
On the other end of the spectrum from Hamlet, there is Dumb and Dumber, a comedy whose title leaves no doubt about its intellectual depth. I’ve seen Dumb and Dumber maybe a hundred times, but it is never redundant. On repeat viewings, I find myself focusing on smaller and smaller details, a snow hat, a pointed pause, or one of Jim Carrey’s rubber-elastic expressions. Going back to the same books and movies for seconds, thirds, or thirtieths is a common practice. I have friends who cannot count the number of times they’ve reread Harry Potter or seen The Shawshank Redemption.
“Why do people do the same thing over and over?” is a common scientific inquiry. Anthropologists study rituals and psychologists study patterns of behavior. But in entertainment and media, where there is so much pressure to be aware of the next new thing, there is something special about the past that is more than mere habit. People enjoy repeating cultural experiences, not only because they want to remember the art, but also because they want to remember themselves, and there is joy in the act of remembering. “The dynamic linkages between one’s past, present, and future experiences through the reconsumption of an object allow existential understanding,” Cristel Antonia Russell and Sidney J. Levy wrote in their study of nostalgia and culture. “Reengaging with the same object, even just once, allows a reworking of experiences as consumers consider their own particular enjoyments and understandings of choices they have made.”
It would be absurd to draft Kant, Loewy, or metacognition to serve in the argument that Dumb and Dumber is a Good Film. It may not be good, and frankly, it’s no longer just a film for me. I’ve quoted it so many times with my friends that the movie’s movieness is secondary. Above all, it has become a language of remembrance, a glossary of old friendships.
This keeps happening to me. I synesthesize my favorite shows and songs, mix them up with moments, give them dimensions they don’t have. My favorite books are also daydreams. My favorite songs are also places. My favorite movies are also friends.
When Bertha Faber sang Johannes Brahms’s lullaby to her son in the winters of nineteenth-century Austria, she occupied two worlds—she put her husband’s child to sleep with the music of a past romance. Psychologists have found a linkage between thinking about the past and feeling good—even feeling warm. People who hear songs and lyrics from their younger days are more likely to say they feel loved, or to say “life is worth living.” Nostalgia and goose bumps have that in common: Triggered by coldness, they’re there to warm us up.
Some books, songs, shows, and art have a certain force. They infect and deepen. They give people the chills. A full explication of this phenomenon is beyond my grasp. But that’s okay. It is not essential to understand each goose bump. It is a secret, after all, a neural whisper shared between the sympathetic nervous system and invisible muscles; a feeling that slips beneath the skin and, without permission, pulls on you, from the inside.