a description

thinking fairly regularly about this peculiar, formative, and possibly ruinous reading habit I developed as a child of skipping names and dates. Can you believe it? Something in my brain rejected the abstract at such a basic level that I just didn’t or couldn’t feel like I was comprehending my reading unless I ignored those elements– which I think just took a lot of brainpower for me. I have very clear memories of skimming them– casting them aside as I went through a sentence in fonts I can easily picture. Memorize, was the feeling– I did not want to interrupt my reading to memorize. Names and dates do get in, cumulatively, but do not get in unless embodied or repeated– ie get in iteratively–or as an effect of being central or core enough to the whole reading experience that I /understand/ a name or a specific time marker. I have basically no cognition of names and dates as containers of meaning, and find the very notion of, or sense of anticipation of the effort of retaining them mildly but distinctly physically repulsive.