Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

After my university course, I took in the year 2000, "An Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism," my love of reading was completely destroyed by overanalysis and the formal application of the process of literary deconstruction that permeated and depleted my entire belief system. My worldview became incredibly jaded and it could not have been more bitter. I simply could no longer read fiction, and I could not believe in anything else either as my willing suspension of disbelief was much, much too greatly damaged. It took years to rediscover, rebuild and recover from this both psychic and intellectual injury. It truly nearly utterly destroyed me.

This is a book that offers full and complete redemption for that soul-rending experience. It is a brilliant, fascinating love affair with the visual that explores the act of reading. It takes abstract thoughts about reading and draws them down to the earth, makes love to meaning itself and gently writes them upon the minds of the receptive. This book solidifies the belief that all authors are curators of experience. It elicits an even deeper feeling of reverence than what was revealed to me previously. The like of which I experienced when I read The Guttenberg Elegies with its description of reading as "a resonance of deep time"( paraphrased) It takes the reader into this same space of "a resonance of deep time," and maps the constellations while still eluding assigning them mythological names or contemporary labels. The author keeps it real.

"the level of detail determines not what a person sees as they read, rather it informs their experience - their reading experience." (paraphrase)

"The feeling of reading in general (is of being)- in many many places at once.�

"We colonize books with our familiars and we exile, repatriate the characters to lands that we are more acquainted with."

"words potentiate meaning."

My summary, based on my understanding of Mendelsunds closing argument, is that:

"we reduce. And it is not without reverence that we reduce. This is how we apprehend our world. This is what humans do.�

---> is that all perception is the result of a blurring of the senses together with a melding of thoughts. These by the necessity of needing to stream and simplify this gestalt ocean of data become outlines, types, categories that are, at best, blurred versions of our perceived realities. And there is a huge, huge difference between deconstruction and reduction that I never knew existed until now. This book exalts (and does not deconstruct) the meaning of 'reduction,' and it also defines the glory to be found in our human attunement to this process of reduction that lovingly blurs our differences.

Perhaps then the unworded proposition is that reading is the act of seeing a bit better through this blur?

I think I might be in love with this book. Can you tell? Or perhaps it's awe, true awe. This is the rare phenomenon of being awestruck by beauty and magnificence combined.