In medieval times, people used to flee the towns to escape the plague. Now they migrate to festivals. After this final weekend of Hay-on-Wye, the mother of all literary symposia, arts fever will break out once more across the country. Hay, meanwhile, is going global, in partnership with the British Council, with spin-off festivals in Mexico, the Maldives and India. Not bad for a wheeze initially financed by poker winnings.
Festival mania has inspired a range of comment, from the sceptical to the delirious. Some years ago, the biographer Michael Holroyd admitted doubts. Last week, at the Dartington festival, he ate his words. "Literary festivals have spread in a way I never thought possible," he confessed. "I am happy to have been wrong."
Readers love festivals as a mixture of recreation, vacation and outdoor seminar. It's a great communal experience. You can meet your favourite authors, have a chat, and get your book signed. There's also the joy of shopping. The American novelist Don DeLillo refers coolly to "the age of consumer fiction". Festivals are marketplaces as well as impromptu summer camps.
Holroyd and De Lillo reflect the artist's preference for solitude and fear of crowds. This is not a universal anxiety. Dickens loved an audience. For others, however, the reading public is a threat not an opportunity.
Art always has had an aversion to explaining itself. This will be not least because, if originality is at stake, the artist is probably in two minds, and unwilling to offer an easy account. When Coleridge was questioned about the abrupt conclusion to the magnificent enigma of "Kubla Khan", he came up with the famous interruption of the person "on business from Porlock". Perhaps it was simpler to speak of a dream than to submit to requests for a mundane explanation of the sublime and inexplicable.
Originality is fraught with risk. For some, it's one thing to explore the fine line between lift-off and disaster in private, quite another to expose the chaos of that interior world to the public. Real self-expression takes place off the reservation. Joseph Conrad once wrote that the true writer should go to the place where "there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds".
Here, the artist is free to create, in a largely silent world. Others, more ruminative, and shy, like Tolkien, speak of the creative mystery as something growing "like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind".
The dignity of solitary quietness may be the latest trend in the world of books. It originates not in festival Britain but, ironically, in the US. Garret Keizer's The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise has just been joined by George Michelson Foy's Zero Decibels and In Pursuit of Silence by George Prochnik. Each is a mild protest against a world progressively more raucous.
Noise is totalitarian. Hitler claimed that the Nazis would never have conquered Germany without loudspeakers. Yet in a crowded space it can be the whisper that commands attention. Next year, perhaps, there could be a Hay festival of silence. And why not? Didn't Wordsworth have something to say about emotion recollected in tranquillity?