I did not learn how to read fluently until I was 13 after spending a year being trained with the Orton-Gillingham approach that used visual, auditory, and kinesthetic techniques to train my mind to process words more quickly— this is known as neuroplasticity. I also did not know how to read an analogue clock until I was 21 when the Arrowsmith Program used neuroplasticity to improve my processing speed through repetitive exercises.
For most of my childhood, the world spoke to me not through text, but through symbols, tone, rhythm and the ancient pull of cycles. While others followed straight lines on the page, I listened for echoes, watched patterns, traced meaning in gestures, seasons, and silence. I knew the difference between dusk and true night; I could feel the weight of a gesture long after it passed. Time was not a road—it was a circle, a turning wheel, a return.
Before letters came to me, myth made more sense than history. I understood the logic of repetition and reenacting meaning— autistic rituals. My mind was shaped by a kind of pre-modern gravity—what some might call “savage thinking,” but which I’ve come to see as a different kind of wisdom.
When I did learn to read, I entered the world of straight lines and written records. But I never forgot the world that shaped me and perhaps that is why I can still feel the pulse of ancient worlds others call lost—the edge where history forgets and memory still lingers.
According to Mircea Eliade’s Myth of the Eternal Return, Modern people (especially post-Enlightenment Westerners) think of time as linear—a straight line moving forward, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. This contrasts with traditional societies saw time as cyclical—constantly repeating, returning to the beginning. Their goal was not progress, but renewal: a return to origins.
If we go back to ancient times we can see that the Greeks, especially Herodotus and Thucydides, were the first to treat history in a secular way. Herodotus (5th century BCE) mixed myth and fact but was trying to understand why events happened, especially the Greco-Persian wars. Thucydides took it further—analyzing politics, power, and war through reason and observation.
The linearity of time found in the ancient writings of the Bible was also revolutionary and influenced Western civilization—including the idea that history has meaning, direction, and responsibility. This persisted even though European folk culture was largely centred on cyclical myths.
I highlight these parallels to demonstrate that I am not a product of literacy alone. I am a survivor of its absence, and in that absence, I learned to listen to the deep rhythms beneath the noise.
— Robert Gervais
robertgervais.ca 
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