“We may not see it, as Dante did, in perfect order, gathered by love into one volume, but we do, living as reading, like to think of it as a place where we can travel back and forth at will, divining congruences, conjunctions, opposites; extracting secrets from its secrecy, making understood relations, an appropriate algebra.”
Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy
Time's Flow Stemmed 
Well chosen quotation from a brilliant book.
Thank you. I dipped in for a reference, and couldn’t stop rereading.
It’s a long time since I read it; a detail that I recall is FK’s extraordinary hermeneutic discussion of the moment in the NT when Jesus says something like, I speak in parables that you might NOT understand. There followed some thought provoking analysis in a book that’s full of much more like it.
Yes, a long time since I read it too. I think I’ll make time to reread properly this summer.