Ideas and Life are complements not substitutes

From my friend Henry Wessells' blog, The Endless Bookshelf, there is this reference.

. . . He disliked the way they seemed to him to use literature as an insulation against life rather than an intensification of it.

He liked books but they were to him a kind of psychic food that should convert to energy for living.

William McIlvanney
The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983; Pantheon Books paperback, [1984])