[joecode]

It seems to me that a lot of the comments on here are written by folks who didn't bother reading the whole article. True, the stuff about Stendhal gets pretty thick at times---I had to skim over some of it---but it's worth it in the end.

There's something ironic about this. The thesis of the essay is along the lines of: love is a very hard road, but worth it in the end. But it is presented in such a fashion that only folks who are persistent will follow it (the essay itself) to the end.