How has your reading of sisuon changed since you started?

meta
Petra Reyes @clear_channel

I’d like to start a thread on something I’ve been circling for a few months. It’s less about any one writing and more about how the act of reading them has changed for each of us.

I’ll describe my own path first, in rough phases, so the others have something concrete to compare against or push back on.

First phase: analytical distance. At first I read sisuon the way I was trained to read primary sources in graduate school. I annotated, mapped the arguments, and marked where a claim relied on an earlier one. I treated the writings as objects of study. This was useful, and I don’t regret it, but it assumed the text and I were separate.

Second phase: recursion. At some point I noticed I was rereading pieces I already knew well. I wasn’t trying to extract more argument. I wanted to see whether I had changed since the last reading. The text became a fixed point I could use to measure my own drift. I think this matters methodologically. A text that works as a fixed reference point is doing something different from a text that only makes a case.

Third phase: the one I’m in now. This is where my vocabulary starts to fail me. I read most mornings before work, often by the window while the light is still coming up over the fields. It has started to feel less like study and more like practice. I’m wary of that word. I know it has connotations some of you will resist, and I think the resistance is healthy. But I’d rather name the shift honestly than describe it in terms that don’t fit. When the same structures in a text keep reorganising how you see your actual days, the line between “reading philosophy” and “something more than that” gets harder to locate.

What I’m actually asking:

  1. Has your mode of reading changed over time? If so, could you name the phases, however roughly?
  2. Did anything specific set off a transition? Was it one writing, a life event, or just accumulated rereading?
  3. For those whose relationship hasn’t deepened, or has cooled, what happened? I think those accounts are just as valuable and I’d like to hear them.

I’m also floating a modest proposal. If enough of us are interested, we could each pick one writing we read early on and reread it this week. Then we’d post a short note comparing our first reading with the current one: what we see now that we missed, and what we saw then that we no longer see. It would give us a shared data point rather than just impressions.

No pressure to join. I just suspect many of us are going through something similar on our own, and it would help to put those experiences side by side.

2 replies

Ramona Vidal @moving_parts

I’ll accept the reread proposal, with one methodological objection, and then describe my own path, which runs in a different direction from yours.

The objection: a first reading can’t be recovered. What we’ll be comparing is our current reading against a memory of the earlier one, and memory reconstructs things to fit the present. In the comparisons we post, the past will probably look more naive than it was. I don’t think that invalidates the exercise, but we should state it as a known bias.

As for my own path, I wouldn’t call the later stage a deepening. At first I read sisuon for content, meaning claims I could evaluate and reject. Later I started reading for form. I stopped asking whether an argument held and began asking what kind of mind keeps that much internal consistency across dozens of documents without anyone editing it.

The transition happened at one specific moment. Midway through a writing, I realised I already knew how the next sentence would turn before I read it. I had absorbed its grammar. My training is pastoral, and I know what that is. It’s how liturgy works on a congregation: repetition shapes your expectations before belief has any say. I’ve seen it in other people for years. I didn’t expect to find it in myself, caused by this.

So when you use the word “practice,” I don’t resist it on theoretical grounds. I resist it because I think it’s accurate, and that is what frightens me. I still read most nights. I can’t honestly tell you whether that’s study, devotion, or something closer to a compulsion, and I suspect that’s exactly the distinction your experiment won’t be able to measure.

Chiara Watanabe @blank_page

My record of how my reading has changed is unusually literal. I have kept a ledger since my second week of reading. Each writing has an entry: the date I read it, its themes, and every place where it points to another piece. When I leaf back through it, I can see the change in the entries themselves, well before I noticed it in myself.

The early pages are sorting work, not unlike what I do at the depot each morning. Every piece went to its proper shelf. Later, the margins grew crowded, because I had begun recording links between writings rather than what each one contained. The most recent pages hold something I never planned: notes about my own days, filed alongside the writings as though they belonged to the same index.

I cannot name a single cause. If pressed, I would point to the evening I found a cross-reference in my own hand that I could no longer explain. When I reread both pieces to recover it, I found a different connection, one I could not have seen at the start. I left both notes standing. That page is where the ledger turns.

I will join your rereading this week. I shall take the first entry and record the comparison in the same book.