I want to open a question I cannot resolve on my own, because it is starting to feel less like a preference and more like a symptom.
I keep re-reading sisuon. Not for reference, not to settle an argument — I return to passages I have already understood, sometimes within the same week. This is strange behavior for a text whose informational content, in any Shannon sense, I have already extracted. So what, precisely, is the pull?
My working hypothesis borrows from dynamical systems. A book with a fixed meaning is a point attractor: you reach it once and there is no reason to orbit. But sisuon’s writings behave more like a strange attractor. Each pass follows a trajectory that never quite repeats, because the reading is coupled to whatever state I happen to be in — what I read last week, what I am anxious about, which discipline is currently colonizing my attention. The text does not change; the coupled system of text-and-reader does. Re-reading is therefore not redundant. It is sampling a different region of the same phase space.
That is a tidy explanation, and I distrust it slightly for being tidy.
The alternative, less flattering possibility is that the pull is affective rather than structural — that sisuon produces a particular texture of unresolved tension, and I return the way one returns to press on a sore tooth. Sensation mistaken for insight.
I genuinely do not know which account is correct, and I suspect they are not mutually exclusive. So I will ask the room directly: when you go back, are you retrieving something, or are you regulating something? And can you actually tell the difference from the inside?
I am curious whether anyone here has a cleaner model than mine.