Some people think they are reading something, but most of the time they are only reading themselves.
A sentence enters the mind like a traveler walking into a small room. What he finds there depends less on the sentence and more on the furniture already inside: the memories, the wounds, the vanity, the fears, the half-finished thoughts. Most readers never notice this. They assume their reaction is the reaction, as if the world speaks one language and it happens to be theirs.
Hermeneutics says otherwise:
You do not meet a text empty. You arrive with history. You arrive with temperament. You arrive with the moods and blind spots that cling to you without asking permission. Even the clever reader drags his baggage behind him.
This is why two people can read the same paragraph and walk away with different worlds. One sees warning, another sees comfort. One sees misanthropy, another sees concern. The text stays still. We move.
The danger is not interpretation. Interpretation is inevitable.
The danger is forgetting that you are interpreting.
When someone answers a long reflection with a fortune-cookie line as it happens often online, you are witnessing is not insight but projection. It is a person mistaking his own lens for the landscape. They don't underestimate the text. They underestimate the size of their own shadow.
A good reader learns to step out of the way.
A serious reader asks: What in me is doing the reading right now? Because without that question, every book becomes a mirror pretending to be a window.
In the end, every act of reading is self-revelation. Some discover the text and a broader horizon. Others stay where they are and wake to the same day once more.