we see what we already know.
We project our own capacities -for good as well as evil- onto the other person. Then we acknowledge as love primarily those things that correspond to our own image thereof. We wish to be loved as ourselves would love. Any other way makes us uncomfertable. We respond with doubt and suspicion. We misinterpret the signs. We do not understand the language. We accuse. We assert that the other person does not love us. But perhaps he merely loves us in some idiosyncratic way that we fail to recognize.

A book, too, can be a star, ‘explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,’ a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.