IT'S THAT BOOK FESTIVAL TIME of year again, when readers abandon their armchairs for the tent.

Times Online will give you the Thirty Best Book Festivals in the UK, and if that is not enough, Europe is hosting festivals almost weekly - just look them up on the net and go.

This year's Hay Festival turned into a book-rockers version of Glastonbury, with more mud on the ground than was ever flung by the critics. For writers, a regular mudbath at the hands of reviewers is part of the job, and festival audiences are an affirmation. After all, if a bunch of people you have never met are prepared to pay to sit in a tent on uncomfortable chairs just to listen to your work, then life is not so bad. For me, who finds the whole process of publishing something like writing a message in a bottle, then discovering that the bottle has been opened and the message understood, is more important than any number of reviews, good or terrible.

I have just come back from opening the Sydney Writers' Festival, where about 900 people turned up to the opera house to hear about the connecting power of books in our lives. The festival drew in different and diverse audiences for writers of every kind. The city was buzzing with words. It is the same wherever you go - people want books, and they want to make time for books. What is obvious is that writing continues to be a serious force, and that real books about real things have not been eclipsed by the media machine of manufactured “popular” culture.

On the other side of the world, struck by the energetic response to writers and books that I find wherever I travel, I felt renewed in my conviction that writing can and does make a difference. Forget Shelley's “unacknowledged legislators of mankind” - that's not what writers are, any more than the work itself is proof of Auden's curious misreading that writing “makes nothing happen”. Energy, wherever you find it, is evidence of happening; something is going on. The energy at book festivals is like completing an electrical circuit; the books, the writers, the audiences, feed off each other, and generate a powerful impulse towards change.

I say “change” because writing, and its necessary complement, reading, makes things happen, first at an individual level and then, through the individual, at a social or political level. What each of us believes and how each of us acts shapes our society and our politics. There is no genuine separation between us and our world, and the apathy and powerlessness that the manipulations of corporate and elected authority evince in us is questioned by the connecting power of art. Sometimes that question is direct, but more often it is implicit. Art is connection, and any of us who are regularly influenced by books, theatre and music find that connection becomes a natural line of thought. Any book or art experience that affects us joins things up - often joining things up that seemed terminally disconnected. A kind of rewiring goes on, which is why the image of a circuit seems apt.

Reading is a particularly effective way of joining up life's endless separations. It's not just that people who read have a wider understanding than those who don't, it's that a reader is someone who knows the difference between information and knowledge (Einstein's distinction). Information is not an end in itself, a fact that is forgotten by education and the net alike. If we want the meaning inside the data we need an extraction system. Art is such a system: sifting, filtering, distilling, and creating in us a discriminating mind rich in feeling. Feeling and thinking are classic opposites, in art they are in synthesis. As Wordsworth put it: “All my thoughts were steeped in feeling.”

Books have all the mind and all the heart. That is why they move us, excite us, affect us. Readers know from their own experience that the lines on a page can change the way we look at life. The activism of books is a not an armchair experience; it is a daily intervention.

I don't think of art as a secular religion with books as its sacred texts, but I think that there is a spiritual alignment between us as meaning-seeking, pattern-making creatures and the art that we have invented. The interior energy that art recognises and represents will always affect the wider world. Never a waste of time then to spend time with a book at home - or in a tent.

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