Never seek to tell thy love,
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind doth move
Silently, invisibly

Sharing beloved works and being disappointed with the reception that meets them, or the perceptions that seem to miss their mark, can be just as ego bruising as seeing our own words misquoted or printed with errors. Emily Dickinson called this going public "the auction of the soul." Why does our ego attach itself to other people's works and words? Is only that we want our tastes vindicated or validated, or does it scratch deeper than that? One of the most miserable nights of my life was a reading given at the close of a two-week poetry workshop I took one summer. I chose to read a relatively quiet poem in a somewhat boisterous crowd of writers. I left vowing never to write another poem and certainly to never share any of my written work again in that kind of a forum. But I can also feel that way when I share a book or a movie with someone and they fail to delight in it in the same way I do. A mentor of mine who taught religious history once remarked that most of her undergraduate students "read history to find themselves in it," or words to that effect. She didn't mean that they read to gain insight into themselves but to find ideas and positions that reflected their own. A truly good reader/listener/viewer does not read to see only a reflection of herself, or at least she shouldn't be dominated by that reflection. How many times have I begun an annotated argument in the margin of some book I'm reading before I get more than a few pages into it? I sometimes think I only know my thoughts in opposition to those of another. And how many times have I found ways to quibble with a book or a movie lent to me by a friend as a means of preserving my individuality and, perhaps, superiority even to that good friend. Despite working in a university and wanting to support, for the most part, its mission, there are many times when I think it breeds a kind of unattractive kind of mental dyspepsia rather than generous reflection and deliberation. Okay, now I'm going to take MY dyspeptic self home.