Instead we turned to the opening paragraph of Susan Sontag's 1963 essay in Against Interpretation, "Camus' Notebooks." For those of you unfamiliar with this work, we will excerpt it here:
 

"Great writers are either husbands or lovers. Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of the lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover -- moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality -- that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar -- if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions and dangerous sensations. And, as in life, so in art both are necessary, husbands and lovers."