394. Reading Broadly

The more you read, the more you can see in each text. Words that were once limited to a single idea can now express varied meanings. A text that once had only literal value can now supply you with multiple worlds.

As your awareness of metaphor and its possibilities expands, you begin to see how it operates throughout language. While you once limited metaphor to certain poetic forms of expression, you are now open to it in even the most dry and prosaic texts. You are open even to metaphors that might never have been intended by the author. You are always looking for ways that the words you read might mean more than they literally say.

By allowing for the possibility of more, you also allow each text to become a more meaningful experience. It is now capable of communicating a more diverse beauty to you, and this beauty allows it to reveal new truths — truths that would have remained hidden had your awareness been too narrow to notice the possibility of them.

You once saw reading as a process of defining a text, of finding the precise meaning it carried. Often that meaning would, in some way, oppose what you already knew to be true, and you would then find yourself in conflict with the text. You can, of course, still see things in this way. But you are now able to see truths embedded in what otherwise appears contentious, contrived, or even contradictory.

These truths are present in the text because of the author’s awareness, which might have been even broader than they realized. By following the intuitions that arose during the process of writing, they left something true for you to discover by paying close attention to the text. But this was only possible because you had already allowed your awareness to expand, by reading broadly and attentively, and by considering new possibilities with every turn of the page.