A Book with Torn Pages

 On the subway tonight, I came to discover that a book I had borrowed had several pages torn from it! What a surprise, and a bit of a frustration, particularly since this book, Elizabeth Grosz's Volatile Bodies, is one of the most readable poststructural texts I have encountered, with sentences that truly cohere and make some degree of sense. But it's perhaps symbolic that the "good read" I was experiencing tonight was disrupted by the sudden appearance of the missing pages. It reminds me that in the end, these compelling words are just constructions that are conditioned by a sense of "completion" or of putting something together to create coherence.
    It makes me wonder...have you ever had one of those experiences where you accidentally flipped ahead of your reading by a page or two, and then had to figure out how you connect the two "disconnected" pieces of text? Sometimes, the mind does in fact have tricky ways of doing this. In the absence of any evidence otherwise, I would find myself asking what I misunderstood or overlooked in not being able to put the two different fragments of the text together. In other words, my mind basically tries to regulate the misunderstanding by trying to create some kind of sense. In fact, we are doing this all the time, in the effort to maintain a shared and practical reality, though we are often unaware that we are doing such a thing. It's only when the process of narrating is unexpectedly interrupted that one starts to become aware that the text is being constructed and "made sense of"continuously by the mind.