It's not the books you read that truly matter to you; it's the books you read more than once that define your mind's evolution.
Sometimes it's not only true that "you can't go home again": You learn that you never truly lived there at all. That's okay. Occasionally harsh, but okay.
An equally humbling lesson will come from the realization of how much you failed to carry away from your first stroll from front cover to back.
Eh. So you lose a few Smugness Points--but call it a bargain anyway. You absorbed. You had the luxury of re-evaluating pure ideas in the cold, hard morning-light of intervening experience.
In both cases, you're actually ahead of the game. And that's never anything to sneer at.
