What does it mean to read - or to write?

Been a long time since I read any Borges but started reading thru an old short story anthology (as readers of these posts may have noted I love to read story collections while traveling) edited by Robert Gorman davis now maybe best known as Lydia davis pere and the first three are Borges. Very oddly while reading the first - the garden of forked paths - I came across a quote that seemed weirdly familiar : in the riddle about the game of chess what word cannot be said.  Where had I read that recently? And it occurred : just two nights before in fates and furies. It struck me as odd at the time. I looked it up and saw that the next line was so you remember our Borges seminar. Anyway story itself quite esoteric and austere and unapproachable like most Borges but the next story is one of great cosmic literary jokes on a par with only one or two others maybe go goals wife and pale fire - Pierre Menard - the author of don Quixote.  Borges's conceit is that this obscure literary figure - the story begins w. A catalogue of his literary output mostly monographs and brief translations of Baudelaire Valery and the like but then the narrator describes menard's most important work - writing DQ not copying translating or updatin but thru laborious effort trying to actually writes the novel. (Something like the monkeys w infinite typewriters composing Shakespeare?). It becomes really funny and provocative when the narrator compares some of menard's Quixote w Cervantes Quixote the quoted passages identical but he finds entirely different meaning in each. So what does that say about how we read and interpret literature? Our judgment is highly determined by what we know about authors and by our preconceived ideas but should it be? Or should we approach everything as a "text"? Should we bring something to every text (how can we not?) or approach every work in an open manner? And ultimately is any text superior to another - and does context matter? Does the same text have different value in differing context? What does it mean to read - or in fact to write?