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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: islands. That I should commemorate all is more than I can
hope or the Editor could ask. It will be more to the point,
after having said so much upon improving books, to say a word
or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as
I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally
understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast
intellectual endowment - a free grace, I find I must call it
- by which a man rises to understand that he is not
punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely
wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them passionately;
and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or hold
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