In Search of (Reading-Induced) Mental Patterns

I'm just now finishing In Search of Lost Time, a book with a special power to invite personal reflection.  As Marcel Proust describes it in the book's unforgettable final chapter, the novel compels readers to "read" their own lives alongside that of the protagonist. 

The way people change over time is a constant theme in the book.  Just as Heraclitus says you can never again step in the same river, Proust insists you never meet the same person twice.  Every time you see your best friend they're a different person than they were the day before, and the previous day's version of them exists only as a memory.  

Naturally enough, reading all of this got me thinking about my own life and how I've changed.  I realized my attitudes, my personality, my tastes, and even my appearance have changed less in the past year than they did the year before.  I then realized that the two years ago I'd changed even more.  Back in college, my entire worldview would shift during a single semester.  In high school, I seemed to reinvent myself every week as puberty and rapidly-acquired experience dragged me from adolescence toward adulthood.  I can scarcely imagine the yearly (and monthly...and weekly) changes my parents saw in me when I was a child. 

These observations begged analysis.  I determined that every year we change a little less than we had the year before- until old age, that is, when the changes again accelerate.  A line graph showing the rate of annual change over a lifetime would look like a V, albeit one where the second line fails to reach the initial height of the first.  

Whether this line of thinking is novel (or even accurate) I'm not entirely sure.  What I do know is that the process by which I came to my conclusion fits a pattern that, for me, represents one of the principle joys of reading.  The book spoke of general truths (personified by the characters), these general truths evoked my personal reflections, and I extrapolated on these personal reflections to compose another general truth.  My personal experience served as a conduit by which a general truth from without became another general truth forged within.  

Perhaps this phenomenon isn't unique to literature, or art.  Maybe it's the universal process by which we add what we learn to what we already knew, thereby producing what we're just now knowing (new knowledge + personal experience= new understanding).  In any case, reading is one of the principle means by which this process is actuated in my mind, and for that I'm eternally grateful to the magic of the written word.