Proust and the Squid

Reading "Proust and the Squid" reminded me of an honors class, I think honors 230, freshman year about brain development. We read about a girl who had been locked in a closet her whole life until she was discovered at 13 and she had very low comprehension of anything and knew little about the outside world, much I guess like "The Allegory of the Cave."

I recalled several other texts we studied in that class while reading "Proust and the Squid," since it deals heavily with the way the brain develops and how reading has changed the very ability and ways in which we communicate.

I found it interesting that reading, apparently, was never meant to be and that it even "altered the intellectual evolution of our species."

I never thought about the ways that the "neuronal connections" are different for what language we read in, for example that the way the brain processes Chinese is different from the way it processes English.

The most compelling part of the reading for me was on page 155 and the Hermann Hesse quote that was given: "For every thinking person each verse of each poet will show a new and different face every few years, will awaken a different resonance in him. The great and mysterious thing about reading experience is this: the more discriminatingly, the more sensitively, and the more associatively we learn to read the more clearly we see every thought and every poem in it's uniqueness, it's individuality in it's precise limitations."

I always find that as time goes on certain passages of reading or lyrics or poems begin to change in their meanings to me. I always thought of it in the way that experiences we have continue to change and so if somebody were to die between the time we first read something and the second time we do so, the meaning would be different but I never really thought of it in the way that things change because the way we learned to read and the way we continue to develop our reading skills is evolving.