Layers Of Meaning

I am doing some reading about the writing of Orson Scot Card, and I came across the expression "...different layers of meaning..."

I must confess that I never understood that expression. If it is a metaphor, it misleads me totally, for I can divine no manner in which one meaning is in a hierarchy with some other meaning. All I have ever seen is facets, different faces, like looking out over the surface of a lake at dawn or sunset, and to see millions and millions of reflections heaving in undulant harmonies, like swarms of precious gems seeking to join into a vast jeweled necklace between the mountains and the sinuosity of the bay.

For me, meaning has no dimension of lower nor higher, even though I am forced to admit that that reflecting ocean has shallows and tidal pools as well as deeps and trenches; yet they are all one.

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