Without literature a person would only be able to expand their mind to the extent of their own imagination. With the beauty of literature, however, a person is able to expand their mind well beyond the limits of their own imaginations and deep into the imaginations of countless other people. To be bound to the confines of your own imagination might not seem limited, but if you were to take away all of the things you've ever read about would you be able to think up such a place as "Lilliput" in "Gulliver's Travels"? What if as a child you had never read or heard stories about far away lands with animals that hop around on their hind legs and carry their young in a pouch, what if you had never heard the tall tales of the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan who dug the Mississippi River single-handedly with...