Rachel

“Writers reduce what they write, and readers reduce what they read. The brain itself is made to reduce, replace, emblemize... Verisimilitude is not only a false idol, but also an unattainable goal. So we reduce. And it is not without reverence that we reduce. This is how we apprehend our world. This is what humans do.

Picturing stories is making reductions. Through reduction, we create meaning.

These reductions are the world as we see it - they are what we see when we read, and they are what we see when we read the world.

They are what reading looks like (if it looks like anything at all).”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read