To Experience!!!!!

So I was not sure if we were suppose to talk about the definition of aesthetic experience with the help of Ellen Dissanayake; or if we were suppose to connect an example of our own aesthetic experience to Dissanayake’s definition. I’m just going to go with the enjoyable one, which might end up answering both anyways. I think I have had many aesthetic experiences, each of a different caliber, but just as ‘extraordinary’. One of my favorite things is reading, it has actually become an addiction that can get in the way of everyday life. I have actually lost count of how many individual books, novellas, graphic novels and comic books, that I have read in my life. Every time that I open a book and start on the first page, I am consumed. I have been over taken by the need to understand, the need to experience and the need to know what happens. I will do everything that I can to finish that book before the day ends, sometimes not even getting up to get food. I am engrossed in the story, the setting, the characters, the plot, the twists, but most importantly I am engrossed in the message. I am known to read any and all genres, it doesn’t really matter but a must have of any book is the message. To me a book with a message is just as strong as a painting with a message. This is where the aesthetic experience of reading comes from for me.
Ellen Dissanayake gives us the definition of an aesthetic experience as the ability “To experience something that is outside order and ordinary - which we can call extraordinary. There is an unquestioned human appetite for intensity, and though we can exist without them, intense emotions make us feel we are living.” Have you ever had a book that just gives you the chills as you read it, you are laughing and crying with the happiness and sadness of the characters involved? These things are a must for my reading experience, which helps it turn into an aesthetic experience. I have many books that I have even read over ten times already, and I still have such an emotional experience when I read them. As I said before, another big factor is if it has a message. I love books that have a strong message, including the genre of comic books. The have been some comic books that have just affected me so greatly, that I still connect other experiences to them.
So for me a great example of an aesthetic experience as Ellen Dissanayake is reading. To me, when reading an amazing book you can “experience something…we call extraordinary,” we can be transported to another life, another universe, or even another time. “Though we can exist without them,” we do not need to read books, we do not need what they give us to live; but they all can “make us feel we are living.”