Measuring myself by a book

When I was about six, my mother marked my height on the doorframe of our dining room with a pencil. She did the same for each of my sisters. The idea was to track our progress with a new mark every year. In the end we didn't keep it up. Moving house two years later probably had something to do with it.

I've often thought that re-reading good books provides a similar way to measure the growth of the mind. You read a book for the first time. Then it sits on the shelf for months or maybe years. When you pick it up again, it hasn't changed, but you have. People you've met, places you've visited, other books you've read unexpectedly contribute to the second reading. You see things you never imagined were in there, passages that were hard to understand before may have resolved themselves; you're able to see the book as part of a broader conversation.

I just re-read Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. I first read that book 16 or 17 years ago, so it's a particularly stark example. I hadn't read Shakespeare yet. Spirits confined in cloven pines and "something rotten in the state of Camazotz" didn't mean anything to me. I vaguely remember struggling with the concepts of dimensions and the square root of 5. I'm not sure if I recognized the biblical quotations.

I don't know what new things I may see when I next read A Wrinkle in Time. I'm confident that I'm currently just scratching the surface of Paradise Lost. A good book gives more the second time, when I have more to bring to it. The best books keep giving more -- again and again -- hopefully for the rest of my life.