I really enjoyed Paul's compilation analogy. It reminds me of a quote by Robertson Davies. "A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."

It also reminds me of that MIT paper that gives advice on how to do research. The part it talks about why it is that when your colleague gives you a paper to read and says it's particularly poignant, but when you read it it doesn't seem like anything special. Maybe it's because your colleague had the dependencies in his state of mind that you did not have in yours, so it didn't seem as memorable to you as to him when the code compiled.