Robert Bringhurst's "Literal Meaning"

Robert Bringhurst is a Canadian typographer, writer, and all-around guru when it comes to letterforms. His classic and highly recommended The Elements of Typographic Style is, in my opinion, the very best of the genre. I came upon a wonderful essay of his in an exhibition catalogue of the work of Robert Hones titled Historiated Letters (1994). Towards the end of "Literal Meaning" he writes:

Reading is older than writing. Fishermen read the sea and sky; hunters read the tracks of animals, the growth of plants, the meanings of their dreams. An Ithakan named Halitherses, Homer says, was "keenest among the old at reading bird flight into accurate speech". But wherever writing exists, reading seems to shrink to two dimensions. Books, of course, have depth, but that dimension is not on the page, it is in the mind. Decorative letters may be filigreed or patterned, but letters made for reading are opaque. They are often engraved or imprinted, but even so, letters define a plane.They create a surface where the gaze of the reader stops. We learn to look beyond them in digesting what we read, bypassing literal meaning to reach the substance and spirit of what is said. But we scarcely ever look for further information within the bounds of the letter itself.

I think that the core of Bringhurst's argument is simply that we must keep looking. The conclusion of this seminar marks the end of the beginning steps of this life-long inquiry into the mysteries of reading and writing.