It isn’t for no reason that we tend to describe the personal as ‘warm’ and the impersonal as ‘cold.’ And yet it is this coldness that is so valuable to an artist, from the standpoint of technique. “When you want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder,” Chekhov once advised a fellow writer. “It gives their grief, as it were, a background against which it stands out in greater relief.” This from a writer who would never seem to a reader, I don’t think, as lacking in the warmth of human understanding.