On Twitter, @Bookworm recommended a post by Roger Ebert.
The post was very affecting.
But what really gripped me was one of the Comments.
It’s been my experience that the Internet tends to lose things. I don’t want to lose this, so I’m stealing all the words to put here and they can damned well sue me if they wish. Copy and paste and save it so they can’t ever make it disappear forever.
By Bud Wright on January 7, 2010 3:26 AM
I have enjoyed your writing since the days when you and Gene first cranked up the original show. It’s how I came to “know” you. I live in NC, so I did not have access to the Chicago papers – and, of course, there was no internet. A Friend of mine who once lived in Illinois accommodated me by cutting out your reviews and columns and sending them to me. His work was patchy, at best. The son-of-a-bitch then had the temerity to move. I found you again, but it took the machinations of the Albemarle Regional Library to restore you to me. I kept watching the show, of course, but it was your writing that really moved me. It took weeks, sometimes months for your works to reach me, but that made the reading of them all the more rewarding. I feasted on your words in the same way that I had once feasted on The short stories that Jean Shepherd had written for Playboy, back in the sixties. To an extent, I didn’t give a rotten-apple damn WHAT you were talking about, as long as you were talking about something. I read no self-pity within your post, so I won’t address your infirmity, except to say that all of my most positive thoughts and very good wishes go with you. And while I cannot begin to empathize with your experience (hell, can anyone who is not you?) I hope it gives you some solace to know that there are untold numbers of people, out in the ether, who value your writings on the level of Hemingway. Good writing is immortal. Please do your damnedest be likewise. I should not like to live in a world in which Roger Ebert no longer illuminates the dark corners. Take care of yourself. Please. Bud Wright
God bless Bud Wright.
Every writer should have a reader like him.
At least one.
The eBook Test 
I was particularly struck by this comment, as well. I love the Internet, but I think it makes us all a bit “lazy” — it’s too easy to read what is there rather than go to the lengths this man did to read what will really feed your soul.
I have been a Bud Wright myself to others writers before there was ever an Internet. And even with the Net, I still go Bud Wright on certain writers.