Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

by Jane Alison

Neuroscientists have recorded the inner sensations of reading as “a felt motionless movement through space.” Once you’ve finished reading, that motionless movement leaves in your mind a numinous shape of the path you traveled. A river, roller coaster, wave.

I move slowly through tricky syntax; luxurious language makes me linger; or I warily await a final word that will snap the whole into sense.

The beats of poetic meter were first the beats of feet, the link between chorus and choreography. And a passage of text is like a passage in place.