Bakhtin the Future

Yeah. That title isn’t like the pun that’s so bad you enjoy groaning. It’s just bad. I thought about finding a pun on the antiseptic spray, but even after watching some ridiculous old commercials on Youtube, I came up with nothing. So we’re left with this one.

Which at least connects Bakhtin with broad notions of time. I’ll let you look up all the biographical information on Makhail Bakhtin that you’d like. For my purposes, I put him on my reading list because he was a literary critic with a musical metaphor at the front of his most famous observation about novels. And as it turns out, that observation has everything to do with broad outlines of time.

I chose The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays to put on my plan because it sounded like a shortish introduction to Bakhtin’s literary theories. As it turns out, though, each essay was about as long as I thought the whole book would be. But I read the introduction and first essay completely and skimmed the rest and felt that I learned exactly what I was hoping to learn. Bakhtin’s main points are these:

(1) While the epic is a settled genre, the novel is constantly critiquing itself and evolving.
(2) The novel includes multiple types of language.
(3) The novelist lets characters speak for themselves in “polyphony” without always judging or correcting their views.
(4) The novel historically springs from humans laughing at themselves.

The first point seemed immediately obvious to me, but the details quickly became fresh and exciting. What intrigued me most was Bakhtin’s recursive analysis: the epic is a fixed genre about a story and values that are themselves fixed, while the ever-evolving novel is about characters who evolve and readers who evolve with them. With remarks like these, I gained a lot of insight during most of Bakhtin’s comparison of epic and novel.

I couldn’t quite go along with him, though, when he said that the epic’s fixed past is completely separated from us – that we neither trace lines to it nor wish to be in it. Let’s consider just a few prominent examples. Bakhtin says an epic is about origin stories: could we agree then to include among epics The Iliad, The Aeneid, Genesis, and Tolkien’s The Silmarillion? Bakhtin explicitly included the first three, and I think I can add the fourth by his definitions. All of these suggest links to our historical timeline. Many Greek and Roman families firmly believed they were descended from characters – whether human or divine – found in the poems of Homer and Virgil. Genesis (along with subsequent books of the Bible) uses genealogies to connect the reader to the record of nonepic histories. And Tolkien had a whole vision of geological cataclysms that turned Middle Earth into Europe and tried on multiple occasions to incorporate the medieval European Aelfwine into the narrative thread as the preserver and translator of the ancient books. Doesn’t the concept of origin story in fact come with its own connection? Such tales tell the origins of things the reader is familiar with: the earthly dominance of the Greeks and then the Romans, the existence of the earth and its inhabitants, the traveling motion of the morning star. (Ah! Eärendil, sailing the skies with the Silmaril upon thy brow!) And as for wanting to be there: I guess I wouldn’t want to be Hector getting dragged around Troy, but I would love to walk the streets of Priam’s city before the war, to see ancient Egypt in operation, and to rest under the light of the trees of the Eldar.

I’ll lump the second, third, and fourth points together and say that none of them made complete sense to me until Bakhtin started presenting concrete examples, which came, not from Dostoevsky as I expected, but from Dickens’s Little Dorrit. If Bakhtin's look at my favorite author made sense to me, clearly he must have been right about everything! He showed, with many familiar examples, Dickens’s narration flowing smoothly in and out of political cant, indirect quotations of “Society,” the language of advertisements, and more. He showed characters speaking in different socio-economic dialects, each representing a different view and set of values. He showed characters quoting each other, the same words carrying new connotations when placed in the mouth of another. And as the demonstration rose higher and higher, the master metaphor of polyphony became more and more perfect. I thought often of Palestrina quoting and reshaping a phrase of chant and then quoting his own new melody over and over in a thickening texture until (in my particular imagined example) five voices all sang together, each with distinct contour and rhythm, but all contributing to a single composition.

I love novels. I love to think about the genre developing over time. I love to follow the arcs of characters who grow with events. I love to think about how novels have shaped my own life. And I love to speculate how the genre, the characters, and myself might change in the future. Now Bakhtin’s views will help me with all that thinking, so maybe today’s title wasn’t so bad.

Murder Must Advertise

Among the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries of Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors stands at the top of my list. Change ringing fills the book, and change ringing is one of the coolest things in this weird old world. But having just read Murder Must Advertise, I’d have to say it comes in a good second for me. This installment of Lord Peter’s escapades doesn’t feature Bunter at all and merely alludes to Harriet only once – definite flaws. But the story, the mystery, the solution, the setting, and the facts revealed about our detective make it all thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking.

I can’t find the reference right now, but somewhere very recently I read that T. S. Eliot, that surprising and erudite champion of detective fiction, opined that, while he approved of Sayers’s style, he found her plots too improbable, breaking one of the then-coalescing “rules” of mystery writing. In the last couple of years, I’ve noticed Sayers breaking a couple of my own rules – rules, in fact, I didn’t know I insisted on until I saw Sayers flouting them. In reading The Five Red Herrings, I discovered that a mystery novelist must not hide a crucial time among a train-schedule’s cascading flood of times (she could have called her book The Fifty Red Herrings) but should instead conceal it in some otherwise irrelevant detail: the beginning of a side character’s favorite radio show, for instance. And in reading Have His Carcase, I realized that the writer of detective fiction must not in the first chapter introduce five suspects whose exact positions along a hazily described geography are all crucial to the solution of the mystery and must be remembered some four- or five-hundred pages later. But this is all good: I learned some important rules that I will remember to follow when I begin my highly successful career as an author of mysteries next year.

Happily, I may report that Murder Must Advertise broke none of these rules. The layout of the offices doesn’t present itself with anything so clear as a visual diagram, but as long as you understand the position of the stairs down which the victim falls, you’re fine. And it’s helpful to remember who rushed out of which office when they heard the noise, but the most important movement is described often enough and close enough to the solution that the reader has no need to thumb back (or click back) through hundreds of pages to review the pertinent details. And adding to its squeaky-clean record on Literary Laws, Murder Must Advertise takes us into the fascinating world of Sayers’s first career: advertising.

Lord Peter jumps wholeheartedly into his first paying job – which he takes on undercover, of course – and armed with his more-than-slightly cynical understanding of human psychology, quickly proves himself an expert at constructing the verbal red capes that draw the consuming public bull inevitably toward the corporate espada. What I enjoyed most in this book were Lord Peter’s introspections, investigating his own actions and wondering whether it shouldn’t be an act of crime to lie to the citizenry in order to manipulate them into trading money for, to mention a prominent example, cigarettes. Detective, catch thyself! As I think about it now, perhaps this very feature is what kept Harriet Vane out of the book. Harriet to a great extent functions in the series as Sayers’s self portrait, but in Murder Must Advertise, the former ad writer surely worked out enough of her personal turmoil through Peter without exposing even more laundry by including Harriet.

I have a magnet on my refrigerator showing an ad from Dorothy Sayers’s most well known and successful ad campaign. The author may have revealed in this novel that her copywriting days haunted her conscience, but how much harm could she have actually done? I know that while I read about Lord Peter’s adventures in advertising, I smiled every day when I looked up at the happy face of a toucan announcing, “It’s a lovely day for a GUINNESS.”

Longfellow’s Optimism

I’ve been reading about mindfulness recently, and the discipline of observing the present moment without distractions from past or future has been helpful in some recent, trying circumstances. But as a way of life, I can’t accept it completely. The past and future possess more than just distractions and anxieties: they offer lessons and hopes, as well. A healthy soul plans – to a healthy degree – for the future and learns from the past – learns how to do things better, learns what not to worry about since one has survived it before, learns how to forgive in other what one has struggled with. As the healthy, reformed Scrooge says, “I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me.”

Longfellow embodies Scrooge’s vow admirably, if he indeed lived the inner life that his poetry represents. He regularly exhibits tremendous optimism based on his belief in God’s righteous justice and a coming kingdom of eternal joy in the Divine Presence. Yet his is no blindered smile-and-ignore-the-truth enthusiasm. Longfellow is no perky ostrich, looking through rose-colored glasses at every grain of sand surrounding his obliviously buried head. He knows the darkness in his heart, in his past, and in his world. “And in despair I bowed my head; // ‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said.”

Of all the beautiful poems I read in the last few days, none struck me quite like “The Bridge of Cloud,” originally published in the Atlantic in 1864 and still on that magazine’s website.

Burn, O evening hearth, and waken
Pleasant visions, as of old!
Though the house by winds be shaken,
Safe I keep this room of gold!

Right out of the gate, Longfellow joins present and past: the hearth has awakened pleasant visions before and is about to do so again. But the visions that Longfellow-of-the-present sees are different from what they were in the unspecified past:

Ah, no longer wizard Fancy
Builds its castles in the air,
Luring me by necromancy
Up the never-ending stair!

But, instead, it builds me bridges
Over many a dark ravine,
Where beneath the gusty ridges
Cataracts dash and roar unseen.

In the olden days, the comforting visions seen in the fire all portended lovely futures of success, happiness, and ease. But his architect was necromancy. What an image! The typical necromancer of tales makes the appearance of life out of what was once living, but Longfellow’s makes the appearance of life out of what is not yet alive.

Unlike those fanciful castles, in the present the unfolding scene is one of a bridge of cloud, bright and soft and fresh in itself, but hovering over a dark past, where, in contrast to the floating hazy water droplets of the cloud, “cataracts dash.” What a perfect phrase! Confusion and chaos abound in those sounds with their four closely packed consonants near the end. Think how much weaker the image would be if instead Longfellow had said, “waterfalls dash.”

And I cross them, little heeding
Blast of wind or torrent’s roar,
As I follow the receding
Footsteps that have gone before.

Nought avails the imploring gesture,
Nought avails the cry of pain!
When I touch the flying vesture,
‘T is the gray robe of the rain.

These last two stanzas are the most cryptic for me. I think that the present Longfellow tends to think of the past as better than it was, gliding over the dark ravines on a bright highway in the sky, but, inspired by the fire that burns to do his soul good, here learns to take an honest look at the trouble the misty clouds tend to obscure. Whose is the imploring gesture? A younger Longfellow, I suppose. But even present Longfellow isn’t sure, I guess, because as he reaches to touch the beckoning hand, the figure proves to be only a gray patch of rain in the clouds. Clouds look so different from different angles. (Yes, I find it very hard to think about this poem for very long without hearing Joni Mitchell. She had the advantage of seeing the tops of the clouds from an airplane, but the earlier poet flew with the airship of his mind.)

Baffled I return, and, leaning
O’er the parapets of cloud,
Watch the mist that intervening
Wraps the valley in its shroud.

And the sounds of life ascending
Faintly, vaguely, meet the ear,
Murmur of bells and voices blending
With the rush of waters near.

Well I know what there lies hidden,
Every tower and town and farm,
And again the land forbidden
Reassumes its vanished charm.

Well I know the secret places,
And the nests in hedge and tree;
At what doors are friendly faces,
In what hearts a thought of me.

OK, here comes the truth. Longfellow leans over the parapets of his nimbus bridge and takes a cold, honest look at his past. What he does with the towns, farms, and people he recognizes is as surprising – to me in any case – as it is exactly right:

Through the mist and darkness sinking,
Blown by wind and beaten by shower,
Down I fling the thought I’m thinking,
Down I toss this Alpine flower.

Oh! If only a younger me could have received an Alpine flower dropped through the heavens from present me! That very wish should lead present me to look up at the clouds and imagine the perspective that future me will have of this troubling time, a vantage point surrounded by asters and edelweiss. 

Asimov and the Great Conversation

Isaac Asimov’s books may not be considered “Great” as in canonical, but he does contribute to what Mortimer Adler called the Great Conversation, exploring in his stories questions of human agency and free will, of what minds are, what thoughts are, and what emotions are. Sometimes I don’t agree with his answers, and sometimes I don’t know if I agree with his answers, but he always makes me think.

Although it was written rather late in Asimov’s life, Robots of Dawn takes place relatively early in his world’s history: to give a rough indication, over the course of this ten-year reading plan, I’m going through all of his robot, empire, and Foundation novels in in-world chronological order, and this is only year three of my schedule. Humans have settled a few planets, but there is no empire yet. So what will happen as they expand? Will the future empire be designed by robots? For robots? Or will robots, bound by the Laws of Robotics not to harm humans, stay out of the way and let humans do the work themselves since challenges are good for society?

Asimov seeks the truth behind the truth (I’m tempted to say the foundation under the foundation, but that’s getting ahead of the story) in asking this question of whether robots will best help humanity by not helping humanity. I would add yet a third layer by asking whether strengthening society is in fact keeping humans from harm. The First Law of Robotics says nothing about Humanity in the collective plural but only one-at-a-time humans: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” Many individual humans have led happy lives in societies less knowledgeable than ours or Asimov hero Lije Baley’s, less scientific, less crowded, less organized. Since the Robot Daneel Olivaw recognizes that challenges are good for humans, might it not be good to make society weak so as to give societal challenges to individual humans? In other words, I’m asking if robots would best help individual humans by not helping society, which they would in turn do by helping to make it easy for human society to expand to other planets.

Near the end of the book, it is stated as undebatable that robots have no feelings, only positronic surges interpreted (mostly by us) as feelings. But perhaps, the narration suggests, humans have no feelings, either – that what we call feelings are only neuronic surges interpreted as feelings. I don’t really understand how Asimov can ask this. Humans do interpret these phenomena as feelings, and that very interpretation makes them feelings without a doubt. How can I think I’m feeling something and not have a feeling? As the old philosophers pointed out, if you think you see a green man, that is in fact the visual sensation you are having, even if you are hallucinating, which is likely in this scenario. On the very next page after this supposition, Baley envies the robots for having no fear of rain, while Baley himself is terrified. Believing that the fear is irrational and comes from neuronic activity doesn't negate the terror that he knows exists in at least one conscious mind: his own. No one could hold a hot coal in the hand and believe that pain was only a neuronic surge.

Suppose you’re reading a book, and at the bottom of page 3, you find the words "Please don't turn the page." You turn the page anyway (who wouldn’t?), and on the left side of the next spread, page 4 says, "That hurt." Page 5 says, “Please don’t do that again,” but of course you again turn the leaf over. Page 6 bears a single word, “OUCH!” The next says, "If you continue turning pages, you will kill me." And on and on it goes. The book responds to every page turn you make; it delivers a message that would not be delivered if you didn’t turn the pages. But would anyone consider this series of responses the equivalent of a human’s internally felt pain after stepping on a nail?

A random note as a coda: I was thinking the other day about the Turing Test, which a computer would pass if its part in a conversation with you – a conversation carried out in written form as, for instance, in phone texts – made you believe you were talking with a human. I think that Alan Turing imagined the test as an incentive to make AI grow ever more sophisticated. But does it take all that much sophistication for a computer program to convince you that you are texting with a typical teenager?

One month later, I have to add a coda to the coda of this post by recommending a story by my friend Jared Oliver Adams. Here my buddy speculates on what might happen if God were to give robots sentience, that is, if they were able to feel the pain indicated (or caused by or accompanied by) their “positronic surges.” At least that’s one interpretation of the story’s wonderfully speculative setting. The tale of Pope Packard also has suspense and adventure, theology and philosophy, and possibly ghosts. If you enjoy it, please visit Jared’s website and let him know!

Dombey Redux

Well, it’s happened. I’ve kept up this blog long enough that I’ve reread a book I already blogged about. So this return to Dombey and Son creates a problem for me. (Admittedly, this is a first-world geek’s problem!) My first post about this forgotten jewel is one of my very favorites on this site: a tribute to Captain Cuttle, one of Dickens’s greatest comedic creations. So what else am I to say this time?

One option is to praise Captain Cuttle even more – especially easy to do when seen next to characters from some other recent reading. In a double dose of Dickens this year, I’ve also made my third visit to Barnaby Rudge, surely my least favorite novel by the Inimitable. I remembered thinking that the part of BR that isn’t dreadful was as good as anything else by Dickens, and innkeeper John Willet a very funny fellow. But this time through, John, although funny as far as being dull-witted in a Dickensian way goes, just struck me as self-centered and cruel. Captain Cuttle, by contrast, compounds his hilariously challenged intellect with kindness and heroism, even risking exposure to the frightening Mrs. MacStinger in order to protect young Florence. On top of that, he prays perhaps more than any character in the Dickens world other than Mrs. Jerry Cruncher in A Tale of Two Cities, even if he does have a very difficult time understanding the words of the Prayer Book.

Or perhaps I could mention some of the other fabulously funny characters in Captain Cuttle’s circle. There’s Susan Nipper, caustic yet nurturing, and ever ready with twisted aphorisms such as “Though I may not gather moss I'm not a rolling stone.” Then there’s the man the Nipper calls “that innocentest creetur,” Mr. Toots. Toots is hopelessly in love with Florence, but interrupts every rebuff before it can be completed with the assurance that “it’s of no consequence.” While on a mission to identify sources of laughter, we cannot omit those two wise counselors, Jack Bunsby and the Game Chicken. The Chicken, a boxer by trade, can’t give Mr. Toots advice that doesn’t involve punching, and Bunsby, with a voice that appears out of a head that seems to have no moving parts, delivers guidance as cryptically ambivalent as anything from any ancient oracle, always to the appreciative amazement of the good Captain Cuttle.

Considering the direction this post has taken, I think my best conclusion is to pay tribute to my favorite funny characters throughout the Dickens world. I don’t know how to order them by level of humor, so I’ll just mention them as they come to me.

• Wilkins Micawber, David Copperfield. In any method of ordering, this author of overeloquent epistles has to come at or near the top.
• Fanny Squeers, Nicholas Nickleby. Douglas McGrath, writer and director of the 2002 film adaptation, calls her letter one of the funniest pages in all of literature. Amen.
• The Crummles, Nicholas Nickleby. Their pony is in the theatrical profession!
• Prince Turveydrop, Bleak House. He has that name and runs a dancing school. ‘Nuff said.
• Dick Swiveller, The Old Curiosity Shop. Dick finds his routes through London getting longer and longer along with his list of streets he must avoid because of unpaid shopkeepers.
• Mr. Wemmick, Great Expectations. How can you top either the humor or the human kindness of a man who sets off a cannon every evening because his Aged Parent looks forward daily to the only sound he can hear?
• John Chivery, Little Dorrit. John’s unrequited love for Amy Dorrit results mostly in daydreams about how his tombstone will describe his tragically lonely life.
• Matthew Bagnet, Bleak House. Friends seek Bagnet’s wisdom, which he dispenses by asking his wife to “Tell them what I think.”
• Tony Weller, Pickwick Papers. How to explain in twenty words or fewer his eccentric view of the spelling of his own name?
• Mr. Twemlow, Our Mutual Friend. Mr. Twemlow holds his palm on his forehead most of the time, unsure whether the Veneerings consider him their best friend or don’t know him at all.
• Ebeneezer Scrooge, A Christmas Carol. Tight-fisted, hard-hearted, and hilarious.
• Sarah Gamp, Martin Chuzzlewit. Some critics put this drunken nurse with the possibly imaginary friend at the top of the list.
• Mr. Mantalini, Nicholas Nickleby. The ludicrous Mantalini tries to manipulate his “heart’s joy,” Mrs. Mantalini, into loving him by threatening suicide with butter knives. “Oh, demmit!”
• Mrs. Plornish, Little Dorrit. The good woman repeatedly offers to translate her Italian friend’s utterances to neighbors into loudly spoken pidgin – even though he speaks in perfectly understandable English.

I know I’m forgetting someone obvious and important. But whatcha gonna do? I’ll have to amend the list the next time I read Dombey and Son.

Elliptical Approaches

Poorly taught Americans (almost a redundancy these days) sometimes tell amazed college professors that the proper form for a paper is (1) to tell what you’re going to say, (2) to say what you have to say, and (3) to tell what you have just said. It’s a gross misunderstanding of the form, to begin with. But what this pattern misrepresents isn’t even a universal custom: only American essays typically follow the introduction-body-conclusion format. In some parts of the world, a writer launches into a topic and then adds accretions of nuance and complexity layer-by-layer. Some cultures prefer a spiral approach to the core idea of an essay, establishing every point of context first and only presenting the thesis near the end.

The British have a lovely way of starting an essay a thousand miles away from the ultimate topic and then surprising the reader with a turn halfway through. The first half is often just as instructive and entertaining as the second, even if its topics don’t find their way into the piece’s title, and I almost always find this form much more delightful than the utilitarian American scheme.

Earlier this month I read an excellent essay in the British idiom by Robert Louis Stevenson. I got the tip to read the piece from Chesterton in his book on Victorian literature, and I read Stevenson’s magnificent “The Lantern Bearers” just after enjoying his novel Black Arrow. Doubly mysterious, the essay takes an elliptical path to the elliptical path that eventually leads to the main point, and since the title refers only to the middle, Stevenson delivers a very satisfying second surprise.

First we hear of the geography of a seaside resort town which Stevenson visited for a week or two at a time for several years as a child. His vivid description puts the whole scene before my eye in great detail and makes me want to visit. After a few paragraphs, I even felt some of the relaxation and comfort I would experience on my own summer getaway. Then the author of so many great adventure novels for (as we see it now) children tells about a custom among the adventurous boys visiting the quaint town. Each one lit a lantern and hid it under his coat while wandering on the strand or along the village streets, every meeting between lantern bearers resulting in unspoken, internal acknowledgement that the pair shared a great secret.

But as wonderful and romantic as that image is, Stevenson has his own secret light to reveal in the second big shift of the piece and makes the custom of the lantern bearers a figure for the secret flame every person carries around at all times. This summit of the essay deals a bit with poetry, as Stevenson delivers his own version of the “mute inglorious Miltons” vision, and has some to say about the weeds of life choking out the life-energy of youth. But Stevenson’s main point, I think, is to remind us that every person we meet has – or is – a hidden treasure. I could go into more detail, but of course, you’d be much better off spending a quarter of an hour reading “The Lantern Bearers” instead of reading my little blog post, so I won’t be offended if you get up and leave now.

I have a schedule of reading precisely because it leads me to just such moments as my discovery of “The Lantern Bearers.” This beautiful essay is itself a burning lantern hidden away under the coat of the more famous works of RLS, and I wouldn’t have uncovered it if I hadn’t planned to read Chesterton’s guide and hadn’t had a Stevenson novel slated the very next month. It’s the best thing I’ve read in quite a while and already a front-runner for my end-of-year rewards next December.

It’s All Latin to Me: John Webster Edition

I just finished reading John Webster’s The White Devil. There’s a lot of scheming and killing in the play, and as to the question, Who precisely is the white devil? several characters provide compelling cases for themselves. According to Webster’s own preface, the play didn’t go over so well at its premiere. The problem may be due to the lack of any appealing characters whatsoever, but also perhaps to the drama’s generous use of Latin. Here’s a little quiz for you today on several classical Latin phrases found in The White Devil.

Latin phrases
1. "Casta est quam nemo rogavit."
2. "Flectere se nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo."
3. "Haec hodie porcis comedenda relinques."
4. "Haec fuerint nobis praemia, si placui."
5. "Inopem me copia fecit."
6. "Manet alta mente repostum."
7. "Nec rhoncos metues maligniorum, nec scombris tunicas dabis molestas."
8. "Nemo me impune lacessit."
9. "Non norunt, haec monumenta mori."
10. "Non potes in nugas dicera plura meas, ipse ego quam dixi."
11. "Nos haec novimus esse nihil."
12. "O dura messorum ilia."
13. "Quae negata grata."

Translations
a. Anything you leave behind is just going to be eaten by the pigs.
b. Chaste is she whom no one asks.
c. If I can't bend the heavens, I will move Hell.
d. It remains deep in my mind.
e. My work will be my reward, if you have enjoyed it.
f. No one provokes me without punishment.
g. These reminders did not know how to die.
h. We know these things are nothing.
i. Wealth has made me poor.
j. What is denied is pleasant.
k. What strong stomachs these farmers have!
l. You can't say more about my trifles than I have said myself.
m. You shall not fear the snoring of the wicked nor become stinky wrappings for mackerals.



DON’T SCROLL BEYOND THIS POINT UNTIL YOU’RE READY FOR ANSWERS!



ARE YOU SURE?



Answers
1: b. This one is from Ovid. It’s part observation and part advice, I suppose.
2: c. The Acheron is one of the rivers in mythological Hades.
3: a. Don’t cast your pearls before swine; don’t even leave them where the swine can find them!
4: e. Many of these quotations came from Martial, writing about his own writing.
5: i. So many examples come to mind.
6: d. This one is from Virgil. I didn’t look up what exactly was deep in his mind.
7: m. Again Martial, this time speaking to the papyrus he has written upon.
8: f. Oh, tough guy, eh?
9: g. I knew we should have burned the evidence!
10: l. Martial was a humble self-critic.
11: h. And yet they are things . . . .
12: k. Horace could praise anything!
13: j. Didn’t know I wanted it until you took it away!

Hoping you enjoyed today’s quiz. The next post will be about a more pleasant piece of reading, so I’ll have more to say about the work itself.