As I reread Edward Whittemore’s “Jerusalem Quartet” for the second time in two years, David Gates asks in his Newsweek piece, “Now, Read it Again”, why some books reward revisiting:

The simple answer is that they give me joy. They fill me with the voices of people I know, thousands of them—many times the number in that old Dickens print—the real and the imagined, the living and the dead. Heaven may be like this eventually, but why wait around when it’s right here, right now?

In a world growing progressively worse—a universal rather than a personal declaration; I quite enjoy my life despite their scabships best attempts to ruin it through their foolish and self-aggrandising behaviour—there’s something wonderfully reassuring about revisiting a beloved novel, finding comfort in well-trodden words, even if the words themselves simply reflect back the world in all its budding bleakness.