Reading is never neutral — the grammar of a sentence is itself an argument about how attention should move through time. You arrive carrying everything — the quality of light this morning, the argument you had, what you most want permission to believe, which problems feel unsolved. The author deposited meaning here weeks or years ago; you excavate it now, with different tools and different assumptions about what counts as signal — and a different tolerance for ambiguity than you had last time. What you find is partly theirs, partly yours — the gap between author and reader is not a failure of transmission but its essential medium; meaning lives precisely in that gap. The same sentence can feel like revelation — insight is pattern recognition across schemas you didn't know were connected; the sentence named something you already knew but couldn't say or cliché — the Russian formalists called this automatization: perception deadened by over-familiarity; defamiliarization is the antidote depending on when you read it — which is why re-reading is autobiography: you are always reading yourself reading.