You Don’t Have to Decide What a Work Means Yet

Time, Reception, and the Freedom to Leave Meaning in Motion

I recently read a conversation between Japanese comedian Ginji Watanabe and novelist Ryo Asai.

Watanabe talked about a difficulty he sometimes has with contemporary Japanese fiction. When characters live in a world close to his own, he can find himself wondering whether people like this really exist. Stories set in another country or another period can be easier to read. He has also spoken elsewhere about having difficulty with certain kinds of coming-of-age or growth narratives.

I do not know exactly what is happening inside Watanabe when he reads these stories, and I do not want to turn a few comments into a psychological explanation.

But his remarks made me think about something broader: what does distance change in the way we receive a work?

A story about someone growing, failing, and beginning again may feel very different depending on who that person is. If the protagonist lived in France a hundred years ago, I might receive the story at the level of humanity: people can fail, change, and begin again. I can take encouragement from that without necessarily turning the story back toward myself.

If the protagonist lives in my country, in my time, perhaps at roughly my age, the distance can become harder to maintain. “This person changed” can quietly become “And what about you?”

The work has not necessarily changed. The route by which it reaches me has.

Understanding a Work Is Not the Same as Receiving It

When we talk about reading, we often compress several different processes into a single word.

We say that someone understood a novel, got a film, or was moved by a song. But these are not quite the same thing.

First, there is reading or perceiving: noticing what happened, how a character changed, why one scene follows another, what the narrator is doing, how repetition works, or what information has been withheld.

This is largely a question of skill. Vocabulary helps. Knowledge helps. Experience with form helps. Learning how metaphor, perspective, rhythm, omission, and structure work allows us to notice things we might otherwise miss.

But something can be perfectly intelligible without reaching us very deeply. We can understand what a novel is doing and feel almost nothing.

The reverse also happens. Sometimes we cannot yet explain why a scene matters, but it remains with us. A sentence returns months later. A piece of music reaches the body before we can describe what it expresses. A film leaves behind a tension that survives long after we have forgotten parts of the plot.

For now, I want to call this second movement passing through: something from the work has crossed the distance between the work and us.

What happens after that is another matter.

Meaning-Making Is Also Editing

Once something reaches us, we often want to know what it means. We ask why it affected us, what the work was really about, or what we should take from it.

There is nothing wrong with those questions. Meaning allows us to connect one experience to another. Naming something can make it visible. Interpretation can open possibilities that would otherwise remain inaccessible.

But meaning-making is not only discovery.

It is also editing.

Imagine that one scene from a novel remains with you for weeks, but you cannot explain why. Perhaps the rhythm of the prose matters. Perhaps it touches an old memory. Perhaps the physical distance between two characters matters more than what they say. Perhaps the scene carries a mood that has not yet separated into recognizable parts.

If we quickly decide that the scene is about family love, we gain something. It becomes easier to hold, discuss, and connect to other things.

But something may also be reduced. Rhythm, discomfort, memory, bodily sensation, and ambiguity may have been moving together before we organized them under a single label.

That is not necessarily a mistake. It is simply a transformation.

Meaning creates connections. Yet not making meaning immediately can preserve other kinds of connection. A scene that has never been fully interpreted may suddenly connect to another film years later. A rhythm encountered in a novel may reappear unconsciously when we write something ourselves. A feeling we could not name may become legible only after an experience we had not yet lived.

Not yet knowing what something means is not the same as nothing happening.

Sometimes it simply means that the possible destinations are still open.

Letting Something Remain in Motion

When something reaches us, we often imagine only a few possible responses: accept it, reject it, interpret it, or integrate it into our view of ourselves.

There is another possibility.

We can let it remain in motion.

A work can reach me without immediately becoming a lesson. I do not have to decide what it says about my life, turn every powerful work into self-evaluation, or place it somewhere simply because it has entered.

It can remain there for a while.

It may change shape, attach itself to another experience, eventually become part of how I think or write, or gradually leave. All of these seem like legitimate forms of reception.

This is where distance becomes interesting again.

Perhaps a story set far away passes through us at the level of “human experience,” while a story set very close to us arrives with more specific demands attached. Again, I do not know whether this explains Watanabe’s own experience, but it suggests a broader possibility.

We may not simply decide whether a work enters us. We may also, consciously or unconsciously, regulate how far it is allowed to travel once it enters.

A distant story may be allowed to give us courage without being allowed to judge us. A nearby story may feel harder because the boundary between “their life” and “my life” becomes thinner.

The difference may not lie in what we understand. It may lie in what we feel required to do with what has reached us.

Perhaps the Burden Is the Demand for Meaning

This distinction matters because interpretation itself may not always be the difficult part. The burden can come from the feeling that interpretation has to happen now.

A work reaches us, and another demand seems to follow almost immediately: what does this mean for you, what are you going to do with it, how will this change your life?

That pressure can turn reception into work very quickly.

If every serious novel, film, or artwork appears to come with an obligation to process it into coherent personal meaning, avoiding such works can become understandable. But if we know that we are allowed to say, “This reached me, but I am not placing it anywhere yet,” the relationship changes.

This does not mean forcing ourselves to encounter works we do not want to encounter. It simply means that people who are curious but wary may have another route available to them.

Reception does not have to end in immediate integration.

What Education Can Teach

This distinction also changes how I think about education.

I do not believe that teaching interpretation is the problem. Children can and should learn techniques for reading expression.

A teacher might point out that weather can interact with a character’s psychological state, that repetition can change the weight of a phrase, that the position of an object in two different scenes can create a relationship between them, or that a shift in narrative perspective changes what becomes visible.

These are useful things to learn.

But what matters is what exactly we think we are teaching.

Suppose a child learns that rain can function as more than weather. The lesson should not become a fixed equation in which rain means sadness. What matters is learning to look at the relationship between the environment and the character, to notice what changes when two things are placed beside one another, to attend to repetition and absence, and to ask what is being expressed indirectly.

Those movements remain useful even when the objects themselves change.

Older literature did not contain smartphone notifications. Contemporary fiction does.

Consider a simple line: “The alarm on his phone went off.”

By itself, it may mean very little. But imagine that it comes after a breakup, in a room where neither person has spoken for several minutes, and the alarm is set for six in the morning.

The sound might mark the return of ordinary time. It might make the silence feel larger. It might suggest that life continues even when the characters are not ready for it.

Or it might do none of those things.

The point is not to create a new symbolic dictionary in which a smartphone alarm now carries a fixed literary meaning. The point is to learn how to examine relationships.

That kind of skill transfers. A student does not need to have seen a particular expression before if they know how to move around it.

Teach the Movement, Not the Destination

This leads to a distinction I find increasingly useful.

Education can teach the movement without teaching the result of the movement.

We can teach students to read closely, compare interpretations, identify patterns, trace perspective, make analogies, support claims with evidence, and notice what is happening in their own response.

What we do not need to decide in advance is what those movements should produce.

A student does not have to sympathize with a particular character, discover the importance of friendship, or connect a story to their own life in a prescribed way.

Once education begins to standardize those outcomes, it is no longer only teaching how to move. It is also deciding where the movement should end.

The same work can move through different people differently. One reader may retain its emotional force. Another may take only a technical insight about pacing. Another may connect it to a personal experience, while someone else may leave it unplaced for years.

None of those outcomes has to be treated as a failure.

What education can reasonably ask is whether students can read with care, notice relationships, compare possibilities, describe what is happening in the text, and, when needed, articulate what is happening in their own response.

What they ultimately decide to keep is another matter.

What If Response Had More Time?

This suggests a small educational experiment.

At the beginning of a school year, students could read a book within a defined period. There would still be an assignment and a deadline for reading, but the first task would not necessarily be a personal response.

It might be a summary or analysis: what happened, how the work was structured, what changed, and what relationships the student noticed.

This would allow teachers to evaluate comprehension without requiring immediate personal meaning.

The response assignment, however, could remain open for much longer.

One student might write it the following week. Another might write it after three months. Someone else might wait until the end of the year. A student who wrote early could even return later and add that an interpretation once felt convincing but no longer does, or that something initially placed in one part of their thinking has since moved somewhere else.

The question could change as well.

Instead of asking, “What did you learn from this book?” we might ask:

“What happened to this book after you read it?”

Perhaps the student remembers one scene but not the plot. Perhaps something remained in motion for months. Perhaps the work connected to another experience. Perhaps an interpretation changed. Perhaps almost nothing remained.

Even “I still don’t know” could become meaningful if the student can describe what that not-knowing consists of: what remains, what disappeared, what changed, and what can now be said that could not be said before.

In that case, the assignment would not evaluate whether the student reached a desirable interpretation. It would evaluate whether the student can observe and articulate a process.

Comprehension and articulation would still be taught.

Reception would remain theirs.

Time Is Part of Reception

We often treat the moment of finishing a work as if reception should also be finished.

The book closes, the film ends, the song stops, and we immediately ask what it meant.

But sometimes that question arrives too early.

Some works arrive almost fully formed. We know immediately what we think. Others remain diffuse. They move without settling, connect to things that did not yet exist when we first encountered them, or change position as we change.

Years later, something that once seemed minor may become central. Something we once considered profound may quietly disappear.

The work may have ended long ago.

Reception may still be happening.

Meaning matters. Interpretation matters. Language matters.

But time matters too.

And perhaps one form of interpretive freedom is simply this:

the freedom not to finish receiving a work yet.