ABSTRACT
Why read a writer’s work or life? We might read for love, for love of wisdom or of God, for love of the Unknown or love of this particular writer whose life and work lies here before us. Reading for love of a writer’s life and work, we’d be warmly disposed, we’d be ready to have words lift our spirit (even though, in other moods, from different lives, those words might strike us differently). Reading for love, strange to say, might also be “hiding a multitude of sins,” or if not hiding them, then showing them mercy rather than submitting them to the full brunt of the law.1
