Producer/Consumer: Circle of Life and/or Art

Somewhere near the heart of art is the spirit that makes what we're doing more important than heat or food or sleep. It happens on both ends, for creators and audience.
But, like anything else, this spirit can be a source of downfall and destruction as well as a source of uplift and creation. Our humanity is found in things that lift us beyond the animal here-and-now and moves us to a place of thought + ideas + imagination.
These things are difficult to say because they are not complete definitions or exclusive applications of the ideas.

It happens on both ends, for creators and audience.
One side of the experience, the creator side, is the cosmic current that pushes and pulls at our psyches, perhaps an aspect of the Muse, although not personified inspiration herself. Inspiration gives us direction, but the spirit I'm talking about compels the process, the journey following her. The audience side, in its base form, is called escapism, but the same taking-leave-from-reality can happen when avoiding things of this world is not the goal.

For most books I read, I reach a point at which finishing the story is the most important thing to me. Famously, I read the first three Twilight books by Stephanie Meyer in about 72 hours. The lamp is at the foot of our bed, and most of the sleep I got in that period, I got upside down. (To read in bed right-side-up requires a booklight.) Nap, read, nap, read. This also happened with Midnight's Children, The Scar, and many other books in the past. It occurs, too, with other mediums, though is not as noticeable since the consumption rate for movies can't be accelerated, and even as I burn through DVDs of a TV show, I'm also doing other things.

Before writing the original snippet, I'd never connected the pull to create and the pull to (for lack of a better word) consume. Deep down I don't think they're the same thing, and maybe not even as connected as siblings, but there is undoubtedly a sense of stepping into the same river, whether I'm hungry to consume art or create it.