There are two ways to relate with a piece of media – through space, and through time. Time is the conventional one. Narrative tells events sequentially, creating story. But space is a more visual, unstructured medium. There is no right way to enter a painting. This is like the cardinal ordering of the real number line against the relative ordering of the complex number space.

Reminds me of the Garden of Forking Paths by Borges. Also, this is an attitude that might help completionists and perfectionists look at their obsession with "finishing things" in a different way – you can never truly complete anything, only arrive at it in a way different from how you arrived at it the first time. As Venkatesh Rao says in this Ribbonfarms article (https://ribbonfarm.com/2016/05/26/how-to-take-your-brain-off-road/), some pieces of reading are so alien that the first time you read them, you are only learning how to read them. Also explains why good works, like classics, reward rereading more than reading. You never arrive at a classic the same way twice. Like the saying "No man steps into the same river twice."