Introduction What Is Reading?

Catalyst Books

If I wrote, “This book is about how to read difficult texts,” it would be true but prosaic. My first readers are graduate students in a seminar about communication method at the University of Ottawa, where I teach, and together we will read difficult texts. It’s a learned skill, one I will use this book to help them acquire.

It would be better if I wrote, “This book is about how to read like you mean it.” It’s about looking for something you feel you have lost, like the woman in the biblical parable looking for her lost coin,6 or my students looking for their lost phones. The woman and my students dig through the room, picking up cushions to look underneath, sweeping the floor, asking each time, Is it here? This book is about reading with that same appetite to find something. We’ll develop the questions to ask as we go.

The ideas come out of my own experience as a student, when two types of books influenced me profoundly. One kind was impenetrable, presenting a wall of dense text that made me feel angry and confused. Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, and in particular the chapter “Discourse in the Novel,” is the first I remember in this category. I read it as an undergraduate in my third year, and I made it to the end out of spite. I also came back to it years later, drawn by the visceral response it had provoked in me in the first place. If I felt angry and confused, it was because I sensed something compelling within the text but beyond my grasp. What mattered was the force of the emotion, not its negative tenor, and I felt driven to discover what it was I sensed. Since then, Bakhtin’s ideas of dialogue, rooted in the material circumstances where talking takes place, have shaped the course of my thinking.

The second type of book was a catalyst. These books were intermediary texts, not in their difficulty (they were not necessarily easier or harder than the impenetrable texts that were a thorn in my shoe) but in the role they played: I could grasp them, and they gave me the conceptual tools I needed to make sense of the impenetrable texts. The authors showed their work, the way my math teachers in elementary school made me show my work. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The German Ideology was one such text, through which I came to read Bakhtin and those in his circle, such as V. N. Vološinov, whose Marxism and the Philosophy of Language now pervades my thinking. The impenetrable books would have remained enigmas were it not for the catalyst books.

Here I am writing a catalyst book. In a broad sense, it’s about the mechanics of scholarly work—the tools we use to generate insight into our world and the lives we lead, to make claims, and to support them. In a narrow sense, it develops an idea I mentioned at the end of an earlier book, The Art of Communication in a Polarized World. That book opens with the question, “How can we change another person’s mind?” It proposes an eclectic set of tools drawn from classical rhetoric, Star Wars, performance art, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (among other things), that allow us to make arguments to put people in a position to see the world in a new way. It ends by doubling back to the beginning. “How do we change people’s minds?” it asks. “By opening ourselves to the possibility that they might change our minds, too.”7 The Art of Communication was about speaking, but the conclusion I reached was about listening. In this book, I speak of reading, but the idea is the same: it’s about how we open ourselves to others and to ideas that scare us because we don’t understand them.

In this respect, talking about scholarly method is really an excuse to talk about something bigger. The field of communication has plenty of method textbooks. This isn’t one of them.

Method in the Social Sciences

If I were to describe method, I would say it is “the word we use to describe how researchers find and use data to understand and explain a phenomenon, in ways frequently influenced by their chosen theoretical paradigm.”8 We study method to acquire a set of tools. We talk about the uses to which we put them and the ways they help us persuade others that our explanation of a phenomenon is correct, or at least better than the ones that preceded it.

When I teach methods, I like to use Gerianne Merrigan, Carole Huston, and Russell Johnston’s textbook Communication Research Methods because Merrigan and her co-authors take a reflexive approach, embracing epistemological questions about how we know what we know (or think we know). To explore the tools of inquiry, they develop a model for building an argument—the claim-evidence-warrant model—initially proposed by Stephen Toulmin.9 The relationship between each of the terms guides researchers as they collect and use evidence: a claim is the “central assertion” on which an argument is built; evidence is the “grounds that support a claim”; and a warrant is the “the primary means of linking research claims to data or evidence” or the “standard the researcher applies to assess the merits of the data supporting a claim.”10

They describe three different paradigms researchers follow as they put this model to use. The discovery paradigm presumes that knowledge is something to acquire through observation; the interpretive paradigm, that it’s something to be contextualized and made sense of; and the critical paradigm, that it serves as the basis of social critique.11 To be sure, my description of these paradigms is schematic. Researchers often work between paradigms, the insights of one shaping work people do in another. Their value here is heuristic: identifying them brings the assumptions scholars make about the nature of reality and the purpose of describing it into clear relief. For instance, the discovery paradigm approaches reality as singular and knowable through observation and measurement. The purpose of research is to represent it accurately. This paradigm is common among behavioural psychologists, quantitative sociologists, and others who aspire to standards of rigour as understood by the “hard” (that is, positivist or empiricist) sciences. Students in my classes often treat it as the default mode against which others must be measured, finding the others lacking in comparison.

What’s important about the other paradigms, however, is that they conceptualize the world—and rigour—differently. The tools they provide answer a different set of questions, which the discovery paradigm cannot answer. The interpretive paradigm, used by people in anthropology, sociology, and various branches of communication studies, is more concerned with symbolic worlds and thus treats reality as multiple and socially constructed. Within it, the goal of research is to explain how people make sense of their lives. The critical paradigm, used in critical and cultural studies, also deals with socially constructed symbolic worlds, but it adds a concern about social inequality. The purpose of research is to bring about social change.

Each of these paradigms comes with its own set of values and, consequently, the goals researchers have when they make claims and the nature of the warrants that support them (table 1).12 The discovery paradigm places value on the related qualities of precision and predictability. Researchers work to be as accurate as possible in ways that allow them to make predictions about similar phenomena, demonstrating cause-and-effect relationships. The warrant for their claims—the grounds on which other scholars evaluate them—are thus reliability (are observations consistent “over time, across, settings, subjects, and instruments”?) and validity (are they applicable “to other settings, persons, or situations”?).13 In contrast, the interpretive paradigm values rich description, which scholars use to make sense of complex symbolic systems. The warrants for their claims relate to plausibility (do they make more sense than alternative explanations?) and the credibility of the researcher (are they in a position to know what they claim to know?). The critical paradigm is similar to the interpretive paradigm: it seeks to untangle the social and political contradictions that characterize a society and explain how people’s actions perpetuate them. Scholars evaluate these claims based on their coherence (do they explain contradictions across different facets of a community’s social life?) and researchers’ reflexivity about the position they occupy (do they take into account how their position shapes their interpretations?).

Method in the humanities takes a different form, although people use a range of tools in overlapping, complementary ways, much as in the social sciences.14 One distinguishing feature for my purposes in this book is the way humanistic method inverts the relationship between the object of study and the world to which it belongs. In contrast to conventional social scientific method, which provides tools to learn about the object one is studying, humanistic method provides tools to use the object of study—the texts we read, in the broadest possible sense—to understand something more about the world. As we’ll see, this inversion changes the nature of the values, claims, evidence, and warrants we can use to build an argument. As we’ll also see, it provides a means to rethink conventional social scientific method.

Source: Adapted from Merrigan, Huston, and Johnston, Communication Research Methods, 100.

How do we understand humanistic method? We turn to the idea of metaphor.

Metaphor: Two Models

“Metaphor is not only one of the most commonly used figures of speech in everyday language,” observes Annemie Halsema, but “it also has attracted more philosophical interest than any other figure of speech.”15 It’s popular because of its fundamentally creative structure, bringing together things that are not alike and forcing us to find the links between them.

Philosophers have been asking how metaphors work at least since Aristotle, who provides two models for understanding them. The first treats metaphor as a form of substitution, where one object replaces another with shared traits. The second treats metaphor as an invitation to explore the dynamic relationship of resemblance between two objects. These models find support in Aristotle’s treatises on rhetoric (the art of speech-making) and poetics (the art of poetry and tragedy). In the Poetics, he identifies four types of metaphor: it is “the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy, that is, proportion.”16 In the Rhetoric, he explains what makes it persuasive: “Now strange words simply puzzle us; ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh.”17 Metaphor works through surprise: by substituting an elegant or more noble word for a plain word, it pleases the listener, who comes to see the object in a new way. The sea is no longer merely the sea, in Homer’s world, but now deeper and darker like wine.

One of the commonest ways to interpret these definitions is to see metaphor as a type of riddle. Aristotle, for example, says, “Good riddles do, in general, provide us with satisfactory metaphors: for metaphors imply riddles, and therefore a good riddle can furnish a good metaphor.”18 Listeners figure out how an object is part of a broad category (or, to adopt Aristotle’s language, how a species belongs to a genus), or how a category stands in for a specific object, or how one object is like another, or, perhaps the most complex task, they work out an analogy in the form “A is to B as X is to Y.” (What term completes the sentence, “The sea is to _____ as wine is to the colour red”? Or is colour even the right category for comparison? Perhaps mystery or emotion would be better.)

It’s the puzzle that engages listeners and, through that engagement, persuades them. It is also the idea that grounds the substitution model: to solve the riddle—to explain the metaphor—is to find the common trait. Consider a famous riddle from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (figure 1). Alice has followed a fretful rabbit down a hole into a world that follows neither logic nor the laws of physics. As she wanders about, she happens upon an odd party, attended by a Mad Hatter, a March Hare, and a Dormouse. She sits at their table, and when the Hatter obliquely suggests she should cut her hair, she scolds him for being rude. The Hatter replies with a non sequitur: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” Alice responds:

“I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles.—I believe I can guess that,” she added aloud.

“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.

“Exactly so,” said Alice.

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”

“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”

“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”

“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”

“It is the same thing with you,” said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.19

It’s a rich passage. We can solve the riddle—and the metaphor—if only we can find the thing ravens and writing desks share in common. The Hatter is no help: when Alice gives up and asks him, he says, “I haven’t the slightest idea.”20 Carroll, tired of being pestered for a response, eventually said, “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!” Author Aldous Huxley proposed enigmatically, “Because there is a ‘b’ in both and an ‘n’ in neither,” while Samuel Lloyd, a famous puzzle-maker from the late nineteenth century, said simply, “Poe wrote on both.”21

What is the Hatter’s comment that “I see what I eat” is the same as “I eat what I see” if not a fortuitous comment on metaphor? “Wait!” you object. “Let’s back up a second. ‘Why is a raven like a writing-desk?’ That’s a simile—it has the word like!” You’re right, of course. But its function is the same, as Aristotle writes: “The simile . . . is a metaphor, differing from it only in the way it is put; and just because it is longer it is less attractive.”22 Metaphor’s defining quality, which simile shares, is the way it moves ideas “from one realm to another, non-intersecting realm.”23

But the Hatter’s riddle also shows the shortcomings of the substitution model because the answer appears to exhaust the question. Once you know it, what else is there to do but move on? Indeed, according to the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, the idea that a metaphor is no more than a puzzle was a symptom of the intellectual myopia that led to rhetoric’s historical decline as a discipline. By the middle of the twentieth century, the study of rhetoric consisted largely in the cataloguing of different tropes or figures of speech. The problem was that if metaphor is just a neat trick, that is, “if an exhaustive paraphrase of the metaphor . . . can be given, then the metaphor says nothing new . . . teaching us nothing.”24

But if we look deeper, metaphor hides a paradox, which is key to understanding the second model, which we can call the tension model. Although metaphor is about similarity—about finding a common trait—it is also about elevated speech, if we follow Aristotle. The thing to which the object is compared is more than the object itself. If it weren’t, there’d be no point in the metaphor—the object would be sufficient on its own. Because the first object cannot be assimilated into the second, metaphor produces difference in similarity.

In effect, metaphor says two contradictory things at once: the sea is like wine, and—because wine is darker and more mysterious than the sea—it is not like wine at all. In other words, at a literal level, metaphors are nonsensical: except for being wet, the sea is nothing like wine. It’s salty, you can’t drink it, and its hue is more blue-green than burgundy. Homer’s assertion is so strange, in fact, that scholars have asked, were the Greeks simply colour-blind? Did they not have a word for “blue”? Did they put some sort of dye in their wine to change its colour?25

Ricoeur calls this facet of metaphor—the falseness of its literal meaning—the “literal is not.”26 Yet, in spite of this inherent falseness, it is clear that the comparison evokes something powerful. If it didn’t, Homer’s readers would not still be trying to discern its meaning three millennia later. But this second facet—its figurative truth, which Ricoeur calls the “metaphorical is”—is tough to pin down.27 We are pulled in opposite directions between different levels of meaning: the words in front of us have, on the one hand, a literal meaning that is accessible but not true, and on the other hand, a metaphorical meaning that is true but not easily accessible.

What do we do with this contradiction? To quote Ricoeur’s philosophically dense language, “There is no other way to do justice to the notion of metaphorical truth than to include the critical incision of the (literal) ‘is not’ within the ontological vehemence of the (metaphorical) ‘is.’”28 By the “ontological vehemence of the (metaphorical) ‘is,’” Ricoeur means the impulse to embrace figurative meaning in ways that cause us to abandon the far more frustrating literal meaning—the “literal is not.” This is something we cannot do. Despite its frustrations, we cannot wish away a literal meaning that, even if it is false, is still present. We must account for it, even if—especially if—it contradicts a metaphor’s figurative meaning. Here is where the “literal is not” makes its “critical incision.”

But before we delve into these questions, let’s take a step back. Is your head spinning? These abstractions can be impenetrable, especially if you’re encountering them (as will be the case for many of my students) for the first time. In fact, I’m counting on it. The first step in reading hard texts is to embrace the disorienting effect they have on us. This act runs counter to our compulsive need, learned over years of school, to be right, or at least not to be wrong. Formal education, with its emphasis on extrinsic factors such as grades, presents us with a false choice between mastery and failure.

Truth be told, the terms mastery and failure are misleading. Mastery seems to imply that a person has full command of a concept or collection of ideas, when in fact, writers (and professors) have just learned to project an emotional detachment from the subject matter that they use to convince readers (and students) that they know what they’re talking about. I discovered this fact only when I became a writer and a professor. As a student, I was persuaded that writers knew what they were talking about, but what I saw was their finished document, which showed no signs of the self-doubt they worked through to create it. As a writer, I know those moments of self-doubt well. The thing readers and students must realize, in Rita Felski’s words, is that “Critical detachment, in this light, is not an absence of mood but one manifestation of it—a certain orientation toward one’s subject, a way of making one’s argument matter. It is tied to the cultivation of an intellectual persona that is highly prized in literary studies and beyond: suspicious, knowing, self-conscious, hardheaded, tirelessly vigilant.”29

Failure is misleading because it seems to imply a finality or point of no return, when in fact what learning really requires is struggle and practice. North American universities (the ones I know best) do us no favours here. As I put together my syllabi, for instance, I must identify learning objectives, which are an unfortunate symptom of the trend to treat education as a means to an end. That instrumentalization works against what I want to accomplish as a teacher. The problem, as Hannah Arendt wrote half a century ago, is that that utility, or the use to which we put something, has come to replace meaningfulness, or the intrinsic value it has for us, and that “utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness.”30 In other words, the ends to which we use something are not ends at all. Instead they become a means to something else. Students might read a book to acquire new ideas, but those new ideas become means to write a paper, which becomes a means to earn a degree, which becomes a means to finding a job, and so on. If students resent having to read something for class, who can blame them? We treat education like an elaborate quiz show, when really, reading like you mean it is more like learning a craft and cultivating your talent.

We’ll spend the rest of the book parsing metaphor’s paradoxical is not/is structure. What we’ll discover is that, ultimately, this structure is liberating: “Metaphor is living by virtue of the fact that it introduces the spark of imagination into a ‘thinking more’ at the conceptual level. This struggle to ‘think more,’ guided by the ‘vivifying principle,’ is the ‘soul’ of interpretation.”31

Method Through the Lens of Metaphor

Let’s return to the question of method. We can look at metaphor, for instance, through the concerns explored above. What does a metaphor-centric humanistic method presuppose about the nature of reality? What values does it privilege? What goals are served by its claims, and what warrants support them? We can also observe social scientific method through the lens of metaphor. What questions does metaphor raise for the critical, interpretive, and discovery paradigms? Must we re-evaluate the conclusions arrived at within those paradigms? If so, how?

In answer to the first questions, this mode of humanistic inquiry treats reality as knowable, but not directly: it is observable in the tension between objects and the things to which we compare them; or, framed differently, between the literal and figurative levels of meaning. This is what John Durham Peters means when he says we must let the texts we read “instruct us, by their distance and familiarity.”32 This mode of inquiry values reflexive, creative expression. Both traits are important: we are reflexive when we navigate between the different levels of meaning, taking into account how and where we move. We are creative when we arrive someplace new, one result being that humanistic work is frequently speculative, rather than falsifiable (that is, having the capacity to be proven right or wrong), as in the discovery paradigm.33 The warrant for speculative arguments is persuasiveness: does the explanation we offer account for the complexities we identify in the object of study? Sarah Maitland, building on Ricoeur, turns to a legal example (a legal metaphor!) to explain how scholars make their case:

In order to ensure that a judge’s ruling is not arbitrary, their interpretation is subjected to validation—precedents are consulted, evidence is presented, arguments are made, interpretations are defended or prosecuted, and, on the balance of probability and in the light of the available evidence, conclusions are weighed. Like the parties to a legal case, readers must build their case for support, attempting to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that their interpretation is the most probable in the light of all that is known about a text [again, broadly speaking]. We submit our understanding to the scrutiny of the court of public opinion, we advance an argument and we await a ruling.34

In chapter 4 of this book, I will subject my argument to exactly these criteria.

Where do other paradigms employ metaphor? Its use is easiest to discern in the critical and interpretive paradigms because they focus on questions of meaning. Within the critical paradigm, metaphors help illustrate the competing interpretations of the world that perpetuate inequalities scholars seek to address. Similarly, within the interpretive paradigm, making sense of complex symbolic systems means engaging reflexively with competing explanations.

In the discovery paradigm, we must look harder. Whenever we ascribe meaning to human behaviour, we are interpreting it, and it’s in that interpretation that we find metaphor. In art, for example, we might contend that “a certain picture that possesses the colour grey expresses sadness.”35 We’re explaining one aspect of the picture—its colour—in unrelated terms—its emotional register. Similarly, in discovery-oriented research, we might contend that an action expresses a mental state, when all we can observe directly is the action itself. Whenever social scientists develop models that explain behaviour in terms of something else, the structure of their comparison is metaphorical to the degree that ideas move from one realm to another.

Consider one of the most influential social scientific articles about interpersonal communication, Charles Berger and Richard Calabrese’s “Some Explorations in Initial Interaction and Beyond: Toward a Developmental Theory of Interpersonal Communication,” which describes how people interact when they first meet. Berger and Calabrese argue that as strangers become more comfortable with each other, their behaviour changes. The more they speak, for example, the less they feel uncertain, which in turn causes them to speak more. Observations such as these lead them to propose seven axioms from which they derive twenty-one testable theorems.

The article represents one of the “major examples of communication theories based on formal logic,”36 yet it is grounded in metaphorical explanations. Berger and Calabrese’s third axiom provides a useful illustration: “High levels of uncertainty cause increases in information seeking behavior. As uncertainty levels decline, information seeking behavior decreases.”37 In simpler terms, people who have just met ask each other a lot of questions, an action that, according to Berger and Calabrese, indicates their uncertainty about each other. As they grow more familiar, they make more statements (figure 2).

In effect, Berger and Calabrese ask what it means to pose questions quickly or slowly. But their answer—that these different rates indicate levels of certainty—is not directly observable: all that they can measure (measurement reflecting the values and warrant of the discovery paradigm) is the rate at which people ask questions. The interpretation requires a leap from one realm (that of observation) to another, non-intersecting realm (that of meaning). This is to say, their conclusion requires a passage through metaphor. As a result, we must be attentive to the paradox described in previous sections. Practically speaking, we must recognize that there are other possible explanations for their observations, for instance in cultural contexts where rates of question-asking might not indicate levels of certainty.

What, then, is the relationship between social scientific and humanistic methods? Where their concerns intersect, they serve as a check on each other. The paradox of metaphor draws Berger and Calabrese’s conclusions into question, for instance, but it does not negate them. They remain sound within the bounds established by their respective warrants. They could even serve as support for claims a humanist might make in Maitland’s court of public opinion. Arguments can be made more persuasive (persuasiveness being the warrant for humanistic method) by amassing more evidence, although whether it comes from discovery-oriented research or humanistic inquiry, that evidence, too, is subject to the paradox of metaphor.

Peering at the social sciences through the lens of metaphor ultimately reveals the degree to which the meaning we make of the world, regardless of our conceptual paradigm, is provisional. Humanistic method complements social scientific method, even as metaphor, which is central to the humanities, pulls back against it.

Chapter Overview: Getting Lost, Finding Our Way Back

Early in my teaching career, I was asked to present ideas about how to be successful to incoming first-year students. I gave them a simple formula: Allow yourself to get lost. Then find your way back. Not only are feelings of confusion normal, I told them, but they’re also the key to learning. If we memorize things, it might seem like we’ve learned them, but we lose them quickly. If, on the other hand, they frustrate us, we can make them ours. (If a professor reads the syllabus on the first day of class, students will forget it. But if a professor reads a poem . . .)

In the chapters that follow, I describe how we harness that confusion. Metaphor plays multiple roles. First, in the distinction between the “literal is not” and the “metaphorical is,” it provides a strategy for reading difficult texts. Confusion, I argue, is a reasonable response when we read things that cannot be true, as is the case for metaphor’s literal meaning. We must look for meaning elsewhere, at the figurative level, and in so doing, develop interpretations supported by persuasive arguments.

Each of the following chapters describes a step in that process by exploring different metaphors for reading. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the “literal is not.” Chapter 1 proposes that to read is to feel lost. In the past three decades, there has been a running argument about the qualities of good academic writing, the implication being that the worst books in the humanities and social sciences amount to nothing more than nonsensical incantations of magic words meant to intimidate readers or make their authors look smart. This chapter explores those debates and the anxiety behind them to argue that, contrary to what critics contend, the confusion caused by difficult writing is valuable for the way it releases readers to explore metaphorical meaning. Chapter 2 proposes that to read is to wander. Being released to explore is one thing; doing so productively is another. This chapter asks what stories like that of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness (read as allegory) can tell us about wandering in search of meaning in a difficult text.

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the “metaphorical is.” Chapter 3 proposes that to read is to feel love. When, through wandering, we find an anchor or perspective, we experience a feeling of euphoria that is the inverse of the fear from chapter 1. The Greeks identified this feeling as eros, which this chapter, following Plato in the Phaedrus and Sappho in her poem known as Fragment 31, explores as a drive we feel pushing us toward the object of investigation. Chapter 4 proposes that to read is to be free. We cannot give ourselves over to the euphoria of metaphor in an unrestrained way because we would lose connection with literal meaning. Here we see that the confusion created by literal meaning remains valuable. Freedom is the inverse of wandering: it is living within the is of metaphor and the bounds imposed by the is not of literal sense. Less cryptically, it is the ability to make sense of—to interpret—difficult texts, not by inventing meaning from whole cloth, but by pulling against the literal meaning to which we remain nonetheless bound. Freedom in this sense is not absolute, but rather a function of greater movement, an idea I demonstrate by using social scientific studies of reading to evaluate my metaphorical claims.

Throughout these chapters, we explore a paradox: sometimes, what appears as communication is non-communication, such as in my example about syllabus reading. When we try to pin a text down, its meaning escapes us. Our reach exceeds our grasp. Instead, what we must do is let go of our desire to know a text as an object. In relinquishing control, we come unexpectedly to appropriate its meaning—to make it our own. Non-communication becomes communication.

The conclusion returns to the question that prompted this book: how do we listen meaningfully to others? How do we open ourselves to the possibility that others might change our minds? To answer these questions, I propose one more metaphor: to read is to live with other people. What we learn from the discussion about fear, wandering, love, and freedom is that to live with others, we must recognize that the tensions between the overlapping symbolic worlds we all inhabit are no more resolvable than the tensions between the literal and metaphorical levels of meaning. I insist, however, that we’re getting a bargain: in exchange for a certainty that was never ours in the first place, we get new worlds to explore. We get to negotiate meaning in an ongoing way, a situation Ricoeur describes as that of “linguistic hospitality . . . where the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home, in one’s own welcoming house.”38