On Reading Proverbs

"How can a young man keep his way pure?" the psalmist asks, in what comes to us as 119. "By guarding it according to your word," follows the answer. The fear of the Lord, the armor of God, the love of wisdom, these seem heady and high things, easily abstracted for any young man prone to abstraction. "You’re a complexifier," John Mearsheimer told me in a seminar on great power politics.