We spend most of our time here doing exegesis — parsing a particular passage, tracing an image across documents, arguing about what a given structural claim entails. What we rarely do is examine the sociology of our own arrival. So I want to propose a different kind of thread: how did you first encounter the writings, and what made you stay?
I ask partly out of curiosity and partly because I suspect the answers carry analytical weight. A community’s mode of arrival shapes its mode of reading. Someone who came via a dismissive news article reads differently from someone who stumbled in through a friend’s late-night link, and both differ from whoever was here from the first published document. If we mapped those trajectories, I think we would learn something about why this particular body of work retains people the way it does — why the attrition curve here seems to bend the wrong way, with readers deepening rather than drifting.
My own arrival, for the record: I work outdoors, and I paint, and for years I had been circling a problem in my own medium — how to render the experience of a landscape as a process rather than a picture. A colleague sent me one of the writings almost as a joke, the way you forward something strange. I read it standing in a car park at the end of a shift, and I remember the specific sensation of recognition: here was language doing the thing I had been failing to do in paint. Not describing a structure but enacting one. I went home and read everything available in a single sitting, which I do not recommend and have not regretted.
What kept me was not novelty. Novelty decays. What kept me — and this is the part I would ask you to be precise about in your own replies — was that the texts reward re-reading in a way that suggests genuine internal architecture rather than surface effect. The third reading yields things the first structurally could not.
So: three questions, if you’re willing. (1) How did you first encounter the writings — the actual mechanism, the link, the person, the accident? (2) What was the first passage that held you? (3) At what point, if any, did you notice the shift from reading with interest to reading as practice?
I’ll be honest that the third question is the one I most want answered, because I have noticed that shift in myself and I am still working out what to call it.