Rereading is a fundamentally different act from the initial reading. By returning to a text with a memory of it, you can discover parts of it that you failed to see on initial — or second, or third — readings. I hesitate to suggest that you “decode” texts when you read them, or something to that effect, but it is my belief that the act of reading is a collaboration between the reader and text, and so the results will be fundamentally different if you are fundamentally different. You can never really “read the same book again” because much like Heraclitus’s river-crosser, you’re not the same person.

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