On vanishing yourself into a novel or a painting

Barnett Newman once did the world the favor of
putting
in a nutshell when he famously quipped, speaking of himself as a painter,that
"aesthetics is for me like what ornithology must be like for the
birds."
Art-works are after all  unique,
not
least
in
that, when they
are
experienced, they
are
experienced
from
within. It is possible to vanish into a novel or a painting and be
half-surprised,
looking away for a moment, that the world was ever there at all